CommentaryDECEMBER 2019 THE FAILURE AT THE END OF HISTORY WE THOUGHT THEY'D BECOME MORE LIKE US. INSTEAD, WE'VE BECOME MORE LIKE THEM. by Abe Greenwald Commentary
DECEMBER 2019 : VOLUME 148 NUMBER 5
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DEMOCRATS AND ISRAEL: NOTHING BUT DAYLIGHT Matthew Continetti SUSAN SONTAG, SAVANT IDIOT Joseph Epstein THE ANTI-HITLER MOVIE THAT NEVER GOT MADE Sydney Ladensohn Stern Acts of terror injure hundreds of Israelis. One act from you can save thousands.
In Israel, only one agency is the official ambulance, disaster-response, and blood-services agency for the nation’s 9 million people. Yet, it’s not funded by the government. When you support Magen David Adom, you get the satisfaction of knowing your gift has impact. If you value life and want to make Israel a stronger, safer place, there’s no greater way than by supporting Magen David Adom. Save a life in Israel. Support Magen David Adom at afmda.org/one-act or call 866.632.2763. EDITOR’S COMMENTARY Did We Blow It?
JOHN PODHORETZ
HE BERLIN WALL was constructed in the that “freedom” had triumphed and that therefore year of my birth, 1961. It was gone by 1990. “freedom” would be the story of the 21st century. T Which means that I’ve lived longer in a world But what kind of freedom? There was no consensus without the Berlin Wall than I lived in the world in on exactly how to help Russia and its former vassal which it served both to imprison millions and to sym- states to achieve Western-style freedom—not to men- bolize the ideological unfreedom that was imprisoning tion China. Achieving the rule of law and creating billions. The thing is, the Berlin Wall didn’t seem like it self-sustaining institutions to undergird democratic was something new by the time I came to know it was values would be a multi-decade project. In the mean- there in the early 1970s. I hadn’t seen it being put up, time, what about the free market? What about pri- and so to me and to people like me at the tail end of the vate investment? Couldn’t we teach these countries Baby Boom, it seemed like it had been there forever, how to be capitalists, and wouldn’t the capitalism like the Great Wall of China or Stonehenge. basically help create the democracies? Similarly, global Communism didn’t seem like a As Abe Greenwald details in his brilliant cover rickety experiment that would collapse of its own in- essay, “The Failure at the End of History,” the mission- ternal contradictions, even though that’s what George aries went native. They might have thought they were Kennan had suggested would happen when he pro- bringing liberty to the world, but it turned out that posed “containing” it in 1947. As the great struggle be- many of them were surrendering some of the key build- tween the United States and the Soviet Union wore on, ing blocks of liberty—sanctity of contract, the right to the idea it might just end, kind of just like that, wasn’t own one’s own property (intellectual property, in this even a matter for discussion or even conscious thought. case)—in pursuit of a different core value. That core The truth is that we were woefully unprepared value was best expressed by China’s Deng Xiaoping as for the victory the United States and the West achieved he began taking his country down a different path away in the Cold War. We did not really think there could from Maoism: “To get rich is glorious,” he had said. be a victory on such a scale, with our enemy not only There was, for a time, an idea that those who vanquished but literally (to use an image from The went abroad after the end of the Cold War in search of Communist Manifesto) melted into air. Just as noth- economies to conquer were somehow acting primarily ing like the Soviet Union had been seen before on this out of deep virtue rather than naked self-interest. It earth, there had never been anything like its sudden was an amazingly short hop from helping open closed disappearance. Without a shot fired between the markets to helping dictatorial regimes control their great antagonists, the Evil Empire evanesced. That is own people with our technology and taking money not something that evil does; and it’s not something from anti-Democratic potentates to advance their empires do either. interests in the United States. Perhaps that is why we Evil never dies. Empires collapse over time. What barely seemed to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the had happened was something new. civilian onrush that brought the Berlin Wall down. A political consensus developed, shared by At this moment, three decades later, it feels like Clinton Democrats and Bush Republicans alike, we blew it.q
Commentary 1 December 2019 Vol. 148 : No. 5
Articles
Abe The Failure at the End of History 16 Greenwald They didn’t become more like us. We became more like them.
Michael The Forgotten Proto-Zionist 22 Medved The visionary life of Warder Cresson.
Sydney The Anti-Hitler Movie That 27 Ladensohn Stern Was Never Made The fascinating tale of The Mad Dog of Europe.
Joseph Susan Sontag, Savant-Idiot 33 Epstein The life and times of a literary celebrity.
Politics & Ideas
Wilfred Reilly The Tragedy of the One-Drop Rule 39 Self-Portrait in Black and White, by Thomas Chatterton Williams
Richard M. Godsforsaken 41 Reinsch Return of the Strong Gods, by R.R. Reno
Politics & Ideas
Naomi Schaefer They Don’t Wanna Work 43 Riley Opting Back In, by Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy
Culture & Civilization
Terry The Auden Poem Auden Hated 47 Teachout On ‘September 1, 1939.’
Lauren The Grand Ole Melting Pot 50 Weiner On Ken Burns’s Country Music.
A.M. Like, Emily Dickinson, 52 Juster Whatever A strange, woke TV rendition of a great poet’s life.
Monthly Commentaries
Editor’s Commentary Washington Commentary 1 John Podhoretz Matthew Continetti 12 Did We Blow It? Democrats and Israel: Nothing but Daylight
Reader Commentary Jewish Commentary
4 Letters Meir Y. Soloveichik 14 on the When American Poets Fought October issue Over Judaism
Social Commentary Hollywood Commentary 10 Christine Rosen Rob Long 56 Requiem for What Drag and Blackface the Mommy Blogger Have in Common READER COMMENTARY
The Historiography of Slavery
To the Editor: Early-19th-century abolitionists 19th and early-20th centuries, in- ILFRED M. McCLAY pres- promulgated the first interpreta- cluding Charles and Mary Beard, Wents two competing views tion, because although they regard- Ulrich B. Phillips, and Woodrow of slavery in the American South ed slavery as morally repugnant Wilson, would later draw heavily (“How the New York Times Is (largely motivated by their evan- on this description. Keen to facili- Distorting American History,” Oc- gelical Protestant faith), to advance tate reconciliation between North tober). One held it to be a quasi- their cause they thought it best to and South, they contended that feudal institution practiced by a argue that slavery threatened the what precipitated the Civil War decadent plantation-owning class economic self-interest of Northern was a combination of high-minded (having mutated from English ser- whites, and not rely on appeals principles such as states’ rights and vice in husbandry in the 16th cen- for equality, human dignity, and practical issues such as tariffs—an tury and indentured servitude in freedom. They cast slavery as in- interpretation that lent the two the Chesapeake during the 17th), herently backward, unproductive, sides a degree of both nobility and and the other, as McClay states, and unprofitable, and as retarding culpability. Ending slavery did not a “source of added wealth for the economic development of the necessitate a bloody conflict, as the relentlessly profit-seeking pro- United States as a whole. slavery’s very inefficiency implied to-capitalist Southern planters.” American historians of the late- it would have peacefully died out
4 December 2019 once Southern aristocrats could no longer afford to sustain it. Of- fered as a partial justification for the Confederacy, this view echoed almost precisely Karl Marx’s earlier analysis in 1861. Robert Fogel (Nobel Prize, December 2019 Vol. 148 : No. 5 1993) debunked all this. Protecting slavery dominated the actions of Southern representatives in Con- John Podhoretz, Editor gress throughout the antebellum Abe Greenwald, Senior Editor period. Waves of immigrants arriv- Noah Rothman, Associate Editor ing in the North fueled its growing Christine Rosen, Senior Writer demographic dominance, which � not only made Lincoln’s election victory possible, but augured the Carol Moskot, Publisher ascension of even fiercer oppo- Kejda Gjermani, Digital Publisher nents of slavery in the future. Only Malkie Beck, Publishing Associate secession could guarantee slavery � would survive. Ilya Leyzerzon, Business Director Moreover, sifting through plan- Stephanie Roberts, Business Manager tation accounts, Fogel (together � with his collaborator Stanley Terry Teachout, Critic-at-Large Engerman) demonstrated that by � and large, plantation owners were Board of Directors neither cruel sadists nor benign pa- Daniel R. Benson, Chairman ternalists, but amoral rational eco- Paul J. Isaac, Michael J. Leffell, nomic actors. Far from backward, southern plantations were highly Jay P. Lefkowitz, Steven Price, profitable and models of economic Gary L. Rosenthal, Michael W. Schwartz efficiency. To extract more labor at the lowest possible cost, plantation Cover Illustration: Yarek Waszul owners pioneered time-motion studies and the scientific study of nutrition. As exploiting slaves To send us a letter to the editor: [email protected] generated higher surpluses than We will edit letters for length and content. could be achieved by relying on free To make a tax-deductible donation: [email protected] labor, plantation owners would For advertising inquiries: [email protected] never have voluntarily chosen to For customer service: [email protected] free them. The Civil War and its outcome were necessary to ensure slavery’s demise. It is no small irony that false de- Commentary (ISSN 0010-2601) is published monthly (except for a combined July/ pictions of slavery invented by those August issue) by Commentary, Inc., a 501(c)(3) organization. Editorial and business offices: 561 Seventh Avenue, 16th Floor, New York, NY, 10018. Telephone: (212) 891-1400. Fax: (212) who wished to abolish it would later 891-6700. Customer Service: [email protected] or (212) 891-1400. be revived by those asserting an Subscriptions: One year $45, two years $79, three years $109, USA only. To subscribe please go equivalence between the two sides to www.commentarymagazine.com/subscribe-digital-print. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, to the Civil War, or that apologists and additional mailing offices. Subscribers will receive electronic announcements of forthcoming issues. Single copy: U.S. is $5.95; Canada is $7.00. All back issues are available in electronic for the Confederacy would rely on form at commentarymagazine.com. Postmaster: Send address changes to Commentary, P.O. Box many of the same arguments made 420235, Palm Coast, FL, 32142. Unsolicited manuscripts must be accompanied by a stamped, by Marx and his disciples. The New self-addressed envelope. Letters intended for publication may be edited. Indexed in Reader’s Guide, York Times’ “1619 Project” is not the Book Review Digest, and elsewhere. U.S. Newsstand Distribution by COMAG Marketing Group, 155 Village Blvd, Princeton, NJ, 08540. Printed in the USA. Commentary was established in first time that inaccurate portrayals 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, which was the magazine’s publisher through 2006 and continues to support its role as an independent journal of thought and opinion. Copyright © 2019 by Commentary, Inc.; all rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. of slavery in the American South drove the abolitionists of that time; reading of the written and online have been deployed to further a ris- they saw their movement as a holy materials distributed by Antifa, ible political agenda. war, with God’s prophets battling however, show they are not “anti- Michael Ben-Gad against clear and present evils. fascists”; they are Communists. University of London In any event, I want to stress Indeed, Antifa is just the street- that my intention in my article was violence subsect of a larger Com- 1 not to sort out the great tangle of munist movement. It follows the slavery historiography, but simply well-established practices forged by to point to the existence of that Communist espionage agents dur- Wilfred M. McClay writes: tangle, as proof that the study of ing the Soviet days. Back then, ’M GRATEFUL to Professor Ben- slavery has for many years, the bet- agents were under the control of I Gad for his thoughtful and inter- ter part of a century, been one of layers of handlers. So it is with An- esting response to my article about the most vibrant and active areas tifa. Additionally, as with espionage the 1619 Project. I don’t think that, of American historiography—con- agents, the source of funding for An- at bottom, we disagree about the trary to the 1619 Project’s assump- tifa members is opaque. Somehow, main things. I would say, though, tions. Those debates will continue, the group is able to send its leaders that he organizes the historiogra- scholarship will continue to de- around the country, provide income phy of slavery a bit differently than velop, and presumably many dif- and expenses for members who have I would. I would want, for example, ferent flowers of interpretation will no visible means of support, main- to point out that a strictly eco- continue to blossom. That process tain websites, and produce written nomic analysis of the profitability will go better if organs like the New publications. Willem van Spronsen, or unprofitability of slavery never York Times stay out the matter and the man who tried to firebomb the was and never would be sufficient allow the subject to be treated with detention center for illegal immi- to decide its fate. The religious a minimum amount of politiciza- grants in Tacoma, was a particularly element in abolitionism was not in- tion and publicity-seeking. violent Antifa member who was able cidental but absolutely central and to obtain firearms despite being essential, especially in the antebel- barred by court order from possess- lum years. Evangelical religious 1 ing any. Although many who show zeal was the propulsive force that up for the periodic riots are not full-time employees of Antifa—in the way that a solider may be a full- time member of an army—they still receive tactical training. Someone is responsible for that training, just as Antifa and someone is in charge of indoctrina- tion and organization. Henry’s article was mostly spot- on, but he should not underesti- Communism mate the ability of Antifa’s handlers to organize and train substantial To the Editor: have cells all over the country. A numbers of violent, and sometimes Y FAMILY lives in Tacoma, review of photographic and video deranged, thugs and send them to M Washington, and we have news stories shows several of their the streets. Perhaps they are just relatives in Portland, Oregon. Nat- leaders appearing in multiple ven- warming up for 2020, hoping that urally, we see and hear a lot about ues around the United States. They the 1968 riots in Chicago will be Antifa. My thought on Warren have learned that if they lie about nothing compared with what they Henry’s well-written article is that their organization and hide the have in store. Antifa is not as amorphous as many identity of the leadership, then Lester Farrell journalists and others seem to be- journalists, most of whom are un- Tacoma, Washington lieve (“The Curious Case of Andy willing to do any stories critical of Ngo,” October). leftist individuals or groups, will 1 Those in Anftifa are well orga- not do much investigative research nized and well funded, and they to find more facts. Even a cursory
6 Letters : December 2019 Warren Henry writes: anarchist. Yet their activism and nated in January 1916 to fill the THANK Lester Farrell for taking violence always seem to be directed vacancy created by the death of I the time to respond to my article. against global capitalism, with gov- Justice Joseph Rucker Lamar, and The public should be more con- ernmental bodies targeted only as an a Senate subcommittee convened cerned about Antifa. I mentioned in adjunct to global capitalism. How- in early February to consider the the lead paragraph that their activi- ever Antifa might self-identify, their nomination. Justice Hughes did ties were classified as “domestic ter- politics are the same far-left politics not resign from the Court until rorist violence” by the Department of Communists and the black bloc. June of that year, when he ac- of Homeland Security during the Mr. Farrell also notes that An- cepted the Republican nomination Obama administration to empha- tifa’s funding and organizational for president. size that the threat is not some bit of support are opaque, a matter that Henry D. Fetter hype spun up by Republicans. establishment journalists are not Los Angeles, California That Antifa is in some sense interested in investigating. On this amorphous does not exclude their point, I can say only that the left is being well organized, let alone dan- traditionally more oriented toward 1 gerous. In the Internet age, it has be- and better at political organization come easier to stand up movements and networking than the right, per- as decentralized networks. In the haps because the left is more orient- Ilya Shapiro writes: worst-case scenario, this structure ed toward collectivist thinking. It is ENRY D. FETTER is right. can be seen in how al-Qaeda was why, for example, one found anti- HIn presenting my history of organized; a more benign example Zionists among the anti-war move- Supreme Court nominations, I re- would be the Tea Party. ment of the mid-2000s, the Occupy versed the order of consequential As for characterizing Antifa movement, Black Lives Matter, and events in that important year of as Communist, it may depend on the Women’s March. The hard left 1916. There were many reasons that how literally Mr. Farrell means the makes efforts to insinuate itself into Brandeis’s nomination was so con- term. As noted in my article, the any left-leaning political project. If troversial and prompted that first name is taken from Antifaschistische contacts between this broader web hearing, including anti-Semitism Aktion, which was affiliated with the of the hard left and Antifa were and, as Justice William O. Doug- German Communist Party in the uncovered, I would not be particu- las would later write, that he was early 1930s. Antifa’s tactics bor- larly surprised—except by the no- perceived as a “militant crusader row heavily from black-bloc groups tion that someone in establishment for social justice.” A then-unprec- of the sort that rioted during the journalism would devote resources edented four months passed be- 1999 riots against the World Trade to the story. tween Brandeis’s nomination and Organization in Seattle. The black his Senate confirmation. Charles bloc, like the later Occupy move- Evans Hughes, meanwhile, was not ment, often describe themselves as 1 just the first and only sitting justice to be a presidential candidate, but he went on to be secretary of state and returned to the high court as chief justice in 1930. In that role, Hughes orchestrated the Court’s Brandeis’s realignment along pro–New Deal, government-intervention lines in a way that belied his (overstated) conservative reputation—a key part Nomination of the Supreme Court’s constitu- tional corruption that was the cen- To the Editor: they did not include, as Ilya Shap- tral narrative of my essay. HATEVER the reasons for iro writes (“Crisis at the Supreme W the Senate’s unprecedent- Court,” October 2019), “the resig- ed decision to hold public hear- nation of a justice (Charles Evan 1 ings on the nomination of Louis Hughes) to run against a sitting D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court, president.” Brandeis was nomi-
Commentary 7 STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION Title of Publication: Commentary. 2. Publication No.: 125- 220. 3. Filing Date: September 26 2019. 4. Issue Frequency: Monthly (except combined July/August issue). 5. No. of Issues Published Annually: 11. 6. Annual Subscription Price: $45.00. 7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Harry Truman, Publication: 561 Seventh Avenue, 16th Floor, New York, NY 10018. 8. Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher: Same. 9. Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor: Publisher: Carol Moskot, 561 Seventh Avenue, 16th Floor, New York, NY 10018; Editor: John Mark Twain, Podhoretz, 561 Seventh Avenue, 16th Floor, New York, NY 10018; Managing Editor: Abe Greenwald, 561 Seventh Avenue, 16th Floor, New York, NY 10018. 10. Owner: Commentary Inc. 561 Seventh Avenue, 16th Floor, New York, NY 10018. 11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: None. 12. Tax Status and Israel (for completion by nonprofit organizations authorized to mail at nonprofit rates). The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal To the Editor: to survive. The Soviets, for their own income tax purposes: Has Not Changed During Preceding 12 Months. 13. Publication Title: Commentary. 14. Issue Date RESIDENT Harry S. Truman’s reasons, stepped in. “They saved the for Circulation Data Below: September 2019. 15. Extent and Nature of Circulation. a. Total Number of Copies (Net press Pwildly exaggerated claim regard- country, I have no doubt of that,” Da- run): Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 13,839 No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest ing his role in the creation of the vid Ben-Gurion later said of the Soviet to Filing Date: 13,665 b. Paid Circulation (By Mail and Outside the Mail) (1) Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions State of Israel (“I Am Cyrus,” Meir weapons that arrived via Czechoslo- Stated on PS Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies): Y. Soloveichik, October) is quite vakia. “The Czech arms deal was the Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 10,255 No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing ironic in view of how small a role he greatest help, it saved us and without Date: 10,065 (2) Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal actually played. Certainly Truman’s it I very much doubt if we could have rate, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies): Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 0, No. speedy de facto recognition of Israel survived the first month.” Likewise Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: following its establishment boosted Golda Meir wrote in her memoirs 0. (3) Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter the morale of many Israelis (and that without the Soviet weapons, Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS®: Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 1,369, their American supporters). But that “I do not know whether we actu- No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 1,318. (4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through recognition was of little concrete ally could have held out until the tide the USPS (e.g. First-Class Mail®): Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 860, No. Copies of help in the face of five invading Arab changed, as it did by June 1948.” Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 910 c. Total Paid Distribution (Sum of 15b (1), (2), (3), and (4): Average armies that were vowing to destroy I certainly would not conclude No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 12,484, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: the newborn Jewish state. Truman’s that Joseph Stalin deserves to be 12,293. d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (By Mail and Outside the Mail) (1) Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County arms embargo against Israel had a hailed as a modern-day version of Copies Included on PS Form 3541: Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 100, No. Copies of much greater impact on the events Cyrus, but Harry Truman certainly Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 100 (2) Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies Included on PS Form 3541: of 1948 than his recognition of the doesn’t, either. Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: new state’s existence. 0, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: Moshe Phillips 0. (3) Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe National Director Through the USPS (e.g. First-Class Mail): Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 0, No. Copies of Sharett bluntly complained to U.S. Herut North America (U.S. Division)— Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 0. (4) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other Secretary of State George Marshall The Jabotinsky Movement means): Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 0, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to that the Jews were “carrying on the Filing Date: 0. e. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (Sum of 15d (1), (2), fight in Palestine ourselves without 1 (3), and (4): Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 100. No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest any aid whatever. We had asked for to Filing Date: 100. f. Total Distribution (Sum of 15c and 15e): Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: arms, but they had not been given; To the Editor: 12,584, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 12,393. g. Copies Not Distributed (See Instructions we had asked for military guidance, ABBI MEIR Y. Soloveichik to Publishers #4 [page #3]): Average No. Copies Each Issue but it had been withheld; finally, made a mistake in invoking During Preceding 12 Months: 1,255, No. Copies of Single Issue R Published Nearest to Filing Date: 1,272. h. Total (Sum of 15f and g): Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 we had asked for armor plating for Mark Twain’s masterpiece of imp- Months: 13,839 No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest buses, but even this had been re- ish satire to support his claim that, to Filing Date: 13,665. i. Percent Paid (15c divided by 15f times 100): Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 fused.” To declare that armor plat- as his column’s title states, “The Months: 99.2%, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 99.2%. 16. Electronic Copy Circulation: a. Paid ing, which would have shielded ci- Land Waited for the Jews” (Septem- Electronic Copies: Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 16,284, No. Copies of Single Issue vilians from being massacred (as 79 ber). Is Soloveichik familiar with Published Nearest to Filing Date: 16,039. b. Total Paid Print Copies (Line 15c) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a): Average Hadassah doctors and nurses were, the prevailing tone of the work? No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 28,768. No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: in April 1948), was a “weapon” and Would he have us regard as serious 28,332. c. Total Print Distribution (Line 15f) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a): Average No. Copies Each Issue During therefore subject to the embargo art criticism Twain’s rant about Preceding 12 Months: 28,868. No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 28,432. Percent Paid (Both was almost inconceivably cruel. Michelangelo in the same vol- Print & Electronic Copies) (16b divided by 16c X 100): Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 99.7. No. Truman’s harsh stand forced the ume?: “He designed St. Peter’s; he Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 99.6%. I certify that all information furnished on this form Israelis to look elsewhere for the designed the Pope; he designed the is true and complete. Carol Moskot, Publisher arms and ammunition they needed Pantheon, the uniform of the Pope’s
8 Letters : December 2019 soldiers, the Tiber, the Vatican, the lieve, mistakenly, that the land was cluded with Cyrus’s call to return. Coliseum, the Capitol, the Tarpeian uninhabited and desolate before Could Truman have done more? Rock, the Barberini Palace, St. John the First Aliyah. Nevertheless, treat- Certainly. But he could also have Lateran, the Campagna, the Appian ing Twain’s humorous mischief as if done much less, and it is very Way, the Seven Hills, the Baths of it were sober, serious, and reliable possible that the administration Caracalla, the Claudian Aqueduct, reporting, will not convince those would have taken a more anti-Israel the Cloaca Maxima—the eternal who believe otherwise. position had Roosevelt still been bore designed the Eternal City, and Michael Young alive. When FDR passed away, and unless all men and books do lie, he West Hartford, Connecticut much of America could not come painted every thing in it!” to terms with the fact that Harry Does Rabbi Soloveichik believe 1 Truman would replace him, it was that the author put aside the satire Eddie Jacobson who told the me- to adopt the tone of Tocqueville to Meir Y. Soloveichik writes: dia, “I wish they knew him as I describe the Holy Land? The visit HERE HAS been a recent effort do.” Knowing both the virtues and Mark Twain describes took place Tto diminish Harry Truman’s flaws of Truman allows us to judge in September, during the drought legacy regarding Israel’s found- him gratefully, 70 years later. season, when large stretches of the ing. Some critics have emphasized Michael Young strangely insists terrain are brown and parched. The Truman’s caustic comments about that the barren country that Mark location of villages on hilltops, hill- Jews in the president’s diary, and Twain encountered is entirely in sides, and the edges of spurs, away others, such as Moshe Phillips, character for the Holy Land in from fields and pasture lands, gave point to the United States’ main- September. Yet it is that very time the landscape a markedly different taining its arms embargo during of year set aside by the Bible for the topography from that of the North the War for Independence. Yet to harvest festival. Had Twain visited American farm. Twain very likely level these criticisms is to view the region at that time of year, in the knew that. His description is consis- history anachronistically, in light biblical age, or during the existence tent with the recurring gimmick of of the even more robust American- of the Second Temple, he would the book: presenting the American Israel relationship today. The fact have seen a Galilee bursting with encounter with the Old World by remains that Truman overcame not agricultural abundance. This, of highlighting (for comic effect) the only some of his own prejudices, but course, is not what he saw in the absurdities that result from viewing also the forcefully expressed view of 19th century. But it is exactly what all through the distorting lens of George Marshall, the man he wor- can be seen in September in Israel American manners and expecta- shipped, in order to support Israel’s today. Moreover: Even once arid ar- tions. One could, with equal justice, creation at the United Nations and eas, such as the Negev desert, where declare Egypt uninhabited after a to recognize it at its founding. That crops never grew, now attract the visit to the Nile Valley in flood sea- he did so is worthy of our admira- wonder of the world in its at least son. Innocents Abroad endures as a tion and our gratitude; and he did partial fulfillment of Isaiah’s predic- comic masterpiece, but in this case so because he was inspired by the tion that God would make Israel’s the joke is on Rabbi Soloveichik and story of biblical Israel, which began “desert into Eden, and its wilder- Commentary. Soloveichik may be- with Abraham’s journey and con- ness into the garden of God.”q
Commentary 9 SOCIAL COMMENTARY Requiem for the Mommy Blogger
CHRISTINE ROSEN
H, FOR the age of the blogger, back when the and breadwinning husbands conveniently in the back- Internet was youngish! The Web, we are told ground, but they would not be held to those outdated Otoday, was more innocent back then, purer, standards of female behavior. better. Individuals could slowly build an audience of The mommy bloggers didn’t prepare martinis for loyal readers by writing a public form of a diary, al- their husbands after work. They proudly drank them beit one more navel-gazing and therapeutic than fact- themselves at daytime playdates while their husbands based, more Oprah than Pepys. were still at the office. By 2006, this had become enough Among the most popular of the confessional of a trend that the New York Times labeled these wom- sites in the early 2000s were the so-called mommy en “Cosmopolitan Moms,” and if the stories of them blogs, where women offered their readers real-time swilling cocktails while their children ran around were descriptions of their lives as parents, along with peeks true, the book The Three-Martini Playdate, published inside their marriages and domestic routines. Their in 2004, wasn’t a parody but a how-to guide. tone was frank and insouciant, and their readers soon Melissa Summers, who blogged at a site called came to feel they knew these women personally, and Suburban Bliss, frequently boasted about hosting felt invested in their lives. “Bloody Mary playgroups,” and as she told the Times: For a few years, the mutual emotional invest- “It is saying mothering will look however I want it ment between blogger and audience worked well. to.…It might just be a way of weeding out the moth- The women who read the blogs felt they had created ers who are righteously indignant about what other a supportive community of real moms tackling every- people do. I know I don’t need more mother guilt or day domestic challenges with humor and grace. The mother judgment in my life.” bloggers felt liberated to write publicly about deeply Other popular mommy bloggers agreed. “I’m an private matters because readers rewarded their rev- open book on my blog,” Melissa Brodsky, who blogged elations with supportive comments and paeans to at rockanddrool.com, told the Free Press. Indeed she the power of womanhood. The overall attitude of the was, writing in graphic detail about her sex life with mommy-blogger brigade, most of whom were stay-at- her husband and her son’s learning disabilities. “I home moms, was one of defiance: They might have found my voice,” she said. “I realize that I can say what embraced the trappings of the 1950s Stepford Wife, I want and people aren’t going to hold it against me, with their child-centric lifestyle and suburban homes and if they do, I don’t care. I’ve realized that my opin- ions do matter and that I can really say how I feel.” Christine rosen is senior writer at Commentary. It was precisely that lack of concern about
10 December 2019 readers’ own opinions that began to wear on many cloyingly perfect, with their #momlife images of ex- fans of the mommy blogs. Readers noted that Sum- pertly prepared meals and punishing fitness regimes. mers frequently got into altercations with other par- If the mommy bloggers erred on the side of re- ents for posting images of their children on her blog vealing too much information about their real lives, without their permission, disagreements Summers Instagram moms reveal too little. Only the perfectly insisted on making public. filtered, brand-consciously curated images of their Her airing of grievances with other parents lives, which they spend an inordinate amount of time seemed to contradict her own claims to embrace non- documenting and performing rather than just living. judgmental parenting. “She sounds annoying,” one Parents magazine featured one such Instagram commenter posted about her on a popular parenting mom, Ginger Parrish, who boasts 145,000 followers forum. “She sounds mentally ill,” wrote another. In and multiple brand sponsorships: “I take a good 20 fact, some of the best-known mommy bloggers were photos of the same thing in every setting. I snap a struggling with mental illness. In 2018, the blogger million miles a minute, hoping for one or two decent Amalah wrote about her attempted suicide via an shots,” she says. And yet, she tells the magazine, she overdose of prescription drugs, posting it just under has “a major passion for living in the moment and a cheerful video of her son’s birthday party the day keeping it real.” before. The number of mommy bloggers who crashed Whether mommy bloggers or Instagram moms, and burned as they wrote is too great to count. there was always significant risk of emotional fall- Clearly the medium attracted people with a out for the families who share their lives with them. predisposition for attention-seeking and latent nar- Bloggers like Amalah claimed to have received their cissism. But trying to put an independent, rebellious, children’s “permission” to post about them online, feminist gloss on a role that by its very nature curbs but how can a child give fully informed consent about one’s independence and places physical challenges such things? And how will those children feel when, as on one’s mind and body created strain for many blog- adults, they read the graphic details about the collapse gers, some of whom began to detail the breakdown of their parents’ marriage or their mom’s complaints of their marriages and their own mental health in about her lackluster sex life? real time. Mommy bloggers were largely seeking at- The most notable meltdown was that of Heather tention for themselves. Instagram moms are more Armstrong, a.k.a. Dooce, who parlayed her marriage mercenary, using their children as bait to attract and mental breakdowns into a book deal (It Sucked corporate sponsors all while strenuously pretend- and Then I Cried: I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a ing that life has no sick days, dirty countertops, or Much-Needed Margarita) and then later went on to cranky children. The commodification of intimacy on write another book about experimental medical treat- Instagram creates its own sort of tyranny because it ments for her depression. For her part, Summers had demands perfection, not mess. to stop blogging or risk losing custody of her children And yet there are echoes of the confessional after her marriage imploded. Her online description of urge of the old mommy blogs on social media. Popular herself for a while read: “Melissa Summers is a writer Instagram mom Hannah Carpenter posted a picture living just outside Detroit with two underage people of herself and her son with the caption, “It’s no secret she is not allowed to mention due to court order (that’s that Tom has been the toughest of my kids to parent, a whole other story).” often leaving me feeling as if I am a ‘crap mom’, as he The problem was that despite claiming not to recently referred to me.” But unlike the old mommy care what people thought of their behavior, mommy bloggers, who would have spiraled into a description bloggers like Dooce and Summers really did seek af- of their own feelings about their kids, Carpenter is all firmation, not criticism. Many stopped writing when business. She declares she isn’t a crap mom and then the criticism (and court orders) began to flow. And offers “a little plug for this shirt he’s wearing from those looking for interesting moms to watch online @shoparq because it’s possibly the best shirt any of moved to social media. my kids have ever owned.” The perfectionist-driven ethos of Instagram, Summers is now on Instagram and Twitter. Her with its emphasis on heavily filtered images over description of herself now notes that she “went on the words and its rewarding of happy (read: marketable) Today Show to tell America she thinks it’s okay to have content is in some ways the most fitting cultural back- a glass of wine while your kids play together. Turns lash to the raw oversharing of the mommy-blogger out America does not entirely agree.” The wine wasn’t years. The Valencia-filtered moms on Instagram are actually the problem. The whine was.q
Commentary 11 WASHINGTON COMMENTARY Democrats and Israel: Nothing but Daylight
MATTHEW CONTINETTI
OMEDAY WE’LL be telling stories round the controlled territory. When he ran for president four campfire about what life was like when support years ago, Sanders was fringe. Now he’s the pacesetter. Sfor Israel was bipartisan. Republican and Demo- “We must find ways to make tangible progress cratic congressmen reliably voted for aid to the Jewish on the ground toward a two-state solution,” Warren state. The majority of Republican and Democratic said. How? Well, a week earlier, Warren had said, “All officials defended Israel in the public square. Republi- options are on the table.” can and Democratic candidates reassured voters that Israel is one issue on which Warren and But- they had Israel’s back. “Israel’s security is sacrosanct,” tigieg agree. “We have a responsibility as the key ally Barack Obama told the 2008 AIPAC policy conference. to Israel to make sure that we guide things in the right “Israel’s security is nonnegotiable,” Hillary Clinton direction,” Mayor Pete said. For Buttigieg and Warren, told the same audience eight years later. the way to “guide things” is to cut aid that flows to Pleasant memories. When AIPAC gathered in settlements or to an Israeli government that annexes Washington in March, none of the major Democratic territory in the West Bank. candidates then running for president bothered to Three of the four highest-polling Democratic attend. Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, presidential candidates are talking about Israel in and Pete Buttigieg appeared instead at the October language other politicians reserve for rogue states. meeting of J Street, the left-wing alternative to AIPAC It’s the latest and most worrisome sign that a growing founded in 2007. The message Biden delivered over number of Democrats place a higher value on pander- video was commonplace. The others were not. ing to progressives than on Israeli sovereignty and “What is going on in Gaza right now is absolutely security. The aggressive rhetoric is another reminder inhumane, it is unacceptable, it is unsustainable,” Sand- of the energy on the political left. Bernie Sanders’s ers growled. In a Sanders administration, he went on, political revolution may be in trouble, but his foreign- aid to Israel would depend on the status of the Hamas- policy revolution in how the Democratic Party sees Israel is going swimmingly. Matthew Continetti is a resident fellow at the Bernie is capitalizing on long-running trends. In American Enterprise Institute. his recent book We Stand Divided, Daniel Gordis notes
12 December 2019 that relations between Israel and the American Dias- to build up credibility with Arab governments terrified pora have often been fraught: “For most of the time by Obama’s attempted rapprochement with Iran. What since Theodor Herzl launched political Zionism at the Obama did do was prepare the ground for politicians First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, and activists hostile to the Jewish state and Jews. the relationship between American Jews and Herzl’s When party leaders reinstated mentions of God and of idea, and then the country it created, has been complex Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in the 2012 Democrat- at best and often even openly antagonistic.” ic Party platform, some of the convention-goers booed. What many assumed was a durable pro-Israel When Benjamin Netanyahu in 2015 criticized the consensus was in fact a consequence of specific his- Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran before torical circumstances. The American left’s goodwill a joint session of Congress, 56 Democratic legislators toward Israel was based in large part on images: didn’t show up. Earlier this year, when the Senate took Israel the scrappy underdog, Israel the land of social up a pro-Israel bill that included anti–Boycott Divest democracy and the kibbutzim, Israel the participant Sanction language, 22 Democrats voted against it. in Camp David and the Oslo Accords. The picture Obama’s second term in office saw an explosion today is different. in far-left activity that manifested itself on campus For the left, the state created in the aftermath of and in Black Lives Matter, intersectional theory, and the Holocaust and invaded by Arab armies has become the Sanders movement. The same young people drive a conquering power. The nation of communes has be- the anti-Semitic BDS Movement and join groups such come the nation of start-ups. The governments of David as Students for Justice in Palestine and If Not Now. Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin have become the gov- They campaign for Sanders and for his friends Ilhan ernments of Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu. Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib. Americans who belong to the millennial gen- They find insignificant, if they acknowledge at all, the eration or to Generation Z have no memory of the threats to Israel and to Israelis from Iran, Hezbollah, Middle East “peace process.” Nor can they recall the Hamas, and Palestinian terrorism. A few quietly hope second intifada or the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Many for the success of Israel’s enemies. In their view of the American Jews express their identity not through world, Palestinians and other members of victimized religious practice and Zionism but through social- classes have no agency and therefore no responsibility. justice activism and tikkun olam. To them, Israel is In 2019, If Not Now published something called an oppressive state with un-egalitarian religious and “Five Ways the American Jewish Establishment Sup- political systems. In a 2007 study, fewer than half of ports the Occupation.” Gordis writes: American Jews age 35 or younger said, “Israel’s de- struction would be a personal tragedy.” Though the lengthy document assailed Is- The following year, Barack Obama won two- rael’s violation of Palestinian rights and the thirds of the millennial vote and 78 percent of the American Jewish establishment’s ostensible Jewish vote. While he was sure to pay obeisance to support of those violations, the report was no the imperatives of Israeli security, Obama’s actions as less noteworthy for the fact that nowhere did president created the space for anti-Israel and anti- it mention Palestinian violence against Israel, Zionist activism within the Democratic Party. “When the continued pledge of many Palestinians there is no daylight [between Israel and the United (including the Hamas government of Gaza) to States], Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes destroy Israel, any mention of the Jewish right our credibility with the Arabs,” he said in 2009. to sovereignty, or even the word “Zionism.” Aided by J Street, Obama opened the shutters and blinds and flooded the U.S.-Israel relationship J Street and If Not Now represent neither the with daylight. His demand that Israel freeze settlement whole Democratic Party nor the entire American construction gave the Palestinians the opportunity to Jewish community. But numbers matter less than refuse talks. His decision not to punish Bashar Assad influence. Progressives are becoming more anti-Israel for gassing Syrians damaged American credibility and as the Democratic Party experiences generational regional stability. His nuclear agreement with Iran not and cultural change. It is revealing that Sanders de- only endangered Israel but also divided and demoral- nounced Israel at the J Street conference while two ized the pro-Israel community. In his final month in of- former members of Obama’s administration looked fice, Obama broke 35 years of precedent and declined to on approvingly. Among the few remaining legacies of veto a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements. Barack Obama is his transformation of the Democrats Ironically—and predictably—these actions failed from a pro-Israel party into an anti-Israel one.q
Commentary 13 JEWISH COMMENTARY When American Poets Fought Over Judaism
MEIR Y. SOLOVEICHIK
N THE 19th century, a poetic debate took place the remaining Jews of Newport left for New York. Long- about theology and history. The contestants were fellow thus found the synagogue locked and empty. Itwo literary geniuses: the man who was then the Longfellow strolled to the Jewish cemetery most famous poet in America, and perhaps the most and was taken with what he saw. Two years later, he famous female poet in Jewish history. The tale, even for published “The Jewish Cemetery in Newport.” Given those uninterested in verse, contains deep lessons about Longfellow’s fame, his poem would have been read by the Jewish past in the United States—and its future. his devotees across the country. The first stanza estab- In 1852, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow arrived in lishes contrasts between the liveliness of Newport and Newport, Rhode Island, and visited the Touro synagogue, the dead Jews lying d buried before him: “How strange the oldest Jewish edifice in America, built by Sephardic it seems! These Hebrews in their graves, / Close by the Jews before the Revolution. In 1790, George Washington street of this fair seaport town, / Silent beside the nev- had toured the town and corresponded with Moses er-silent waves, / rest in all this moving up and down!” Seixas, leader of the Jewish community. Seixas famously Following the tradition of their ancestors, the described the newly established government as one that Jews of Newport laid some of the gravestones horizon- “gives to bigotry no sanction,” and Washington respond- tally. The stone tablets on the ground, with Hebrew ed by adopting the very same phrase, forever associating letters etched upon them, reminded Longfellow of Newport’s Jews with religious liberty. the shattering of the covenant at the sin of the Golden Yet at the time, Judaism in Newport was dying. Calf: “And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown, Seixas’s letters reveal that he was desperately strug- / That pave with level flags their burial-place, / Seem gling to maintain traditional services; he lacked anyone like the tablets of the Law, thrown down / And broken remotely qualified to read from the Torah, and the one by Moses at the mountain’s base.” shofar for the High Holidays was badly damaged. It was Throughout the poem, Longfellow expresses only two decades after Washington’s famous visit that sympathy for the Jews who suffered:
Meir Y. Soloveichik is the rabbi of Congregation Pride and humiliation hand in hand Shearith Israel in New York City and the director of Walked with them through the world where’er they went; the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Trampled and beaten were they as the sand, Yeshiva University. And yet unshaken as the continent.
14 December 2019 To Longfellow, the beautiful abandoned build- Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet, ing bespoke the fossilized form of the Jewish people: With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod. “Closed are the portals of their Synagogue, / No Take off your shoes as by the burning bush, Psalms of David now the silence break, No Rabbi Before the mystery of death and God. reads the ancient Decalogue / In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.” He concluded with a eulogy for the Whereas Longfellow thought of the Jewish cov- people of Israel: enantal tablets shattered at Sinai, Lazarus invokes the burning bush where Moses first met the Divine at Si- But ah! what once has been shall be no more! nai. As David Gelernter once wrote in these pages, the The groaning earth in travail and in pain miracle is “not the burning but the continued burning. Brings forth its races, but does not restore, Those dry thorns should have burned to black dust in And the dead nations never rise again. an instant. But time has been stretched out, stretched thin, and a moment of instantaneous combustion lasts Fifteen years later, a young Jewish woman by on and on.” The Jews endure, and the fire of Sinai could the name of Emma Lazarus came on vacation to New- still be sensed in that empty sanctuary. port. She had been raised in wealth and privilege; her This past month, I travelled with members of family, still religiously affiliated, was not rigorously my congregation, New York’s Shearith Israel, to which observant. Longfellow’s description of her people’s Lazarus had belonged, to spend Shabbat at Touro syna- demise was well known to her. For Lazarus, this was gogue in Newport. It was intensely moving to pray the personal. She was a descendant of the Seixas family. It same Sephardic liturgy that Seixas would have used, was the Judaism of her predecessors that Longfellow and to sing the tunes he would have sung. We then had deemed to be dead. visited the cemetery, read both poems, and recited Something—national indignation, family pride, Kaddish, feeling intensely how the Jewish people, of- or profound religious insight—welled up within her, ten deemed dead, have indeed risen again and again. and the teenager drafted a poem in response. Mimick- At that moment, the promise of America, embodied by ing Longfellow’s meter, she chose a title that reflected Washington’s visit to Newport, suddenly merged with a difference of emphasis: “In the Jewish Synagogue at the loyalty that Moses Seixas showed for his own faith Newport.” For Lazarus, it was the sanctuary where her and people. predecessors had prayed that was the truly inspiring Lazarus went on to lead a life of Jewish activism. site more than their burial ground. The poem focuses Today she is known first and foremost for her celebra- on the lives they lived, rather than on their deaths. tion not of the burning bush, but of a different source Lazarus gives tribute to the radiance of freedom of illumination, that of the Statue of Liberty: “I lift my her forefathers had found in America, but she reflects lamp beside the golden door.” For many American Jews, on how the synagogue transported a visitor from the Lazarus’s ode to America is rightly associated with our present to the roots of the Jewish people: “How as we ancestors’ immigration and the blessings of freedom. gaze, in this new world of light, / Upon this relic of the At the same time, the Jewish arrival in America was to a days of old, / The present vanishes, and tropic bloom / great extent followed by abandonment of Jewish iden- And Eastern towns and temples we behold.” No one had tity. Many American Jews might readily identify with read from the Torah in that synagogue in decades, yet the legacy of liberty associated with Newport, but less standing there, in communion with her predecessors, so with Seixas’s struggle to keep Judaism alive. Lazarus felt herself travel back in time back to Sinai Rather than assimilation, our responsibility as itself: “A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount, / A Jews is to combine the lamp of America with the fire man who reads Jehovah’s written law, / ’Midst blinding of Judaism. The shofar that Moses Seixas sought to glory and effulgence rare, / Unto a people prone with sound was utilized in a relevant metaphor by Cynthia reverent awe.” Ozick: “If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, Lazarus admits to a cruel irony; in the sanctuary, we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind “The light of the ‘perpetual lamp’ is spent / That an un- rather than Jewish and blow into the wide part, we dying radiance was to shed.” (All synagogues feature an will not be heard at all; for us, America will have been eternal flame meant to symbolize the divine presence.) in vain.” It falls to us, in this “new world of light,” to be Yet she insists that even as the light in the synagogue inspired by Lazarus’s Newport poem, to make the case may have ceased to be lit, the Jewish flame endures. for the eternal fire of Jewish identity, and to summon Her conclusion is a direct response to Longfellow: the loyalty to live by its luminance.q
Commentary 15 THE FAILURE AT THE END OF HISTORY WE THOUGHT THEY'D BECOME MORE LIKE US. INSTEAD, WE'VE BECOME MORE LIKE THEM. by Abe Greenwald
HE UNITED STATES is entangled in But the foreign entanglements that currently consume foreign intrigue to an extent not seen our national discussions are utterly unlike those seen since the Cold War. This might seem during our global conflict with the Soviet Union. The like an odd development for a country espionage of the Cold War era has been replaced by whose two leading political parties a series of scandals or controversies—some political, have taken a turn toward isolationism. some commercial—in which American politicians and T businesses entities have been exposed engaging in cra- Abe Greenwald is senior editor of Commentary. ven behavior involving parties abroad.
16 December 2019 Foremost among our front-page political scan- But while this engagement has yielded some dals is President Donald Trump’s odd stance toward good, that’s not all it did. We barely noticed that the the government of Ukraine. The case for impeaching process meant the United States was growing more the president rests on his allegedly having halted intertwined with kleptocracies. And in time, almost military aid to our Eastern European ally to coerce without realizing it, we ourselves would fall prey to Kiev into investigating his political rival, former vice some of the kleptocratic temptations and moral com- president Joe Biden. Biden, for his part, is contending promises that characterize such regimes. with his own related political scandal. He has found We did make some countries better places. But, himself under increased scrutiny for his son Hunter’s in the process, our own politics became a little more role on the boards of both a Ukrainian energy com- like theirs. pany and a Chinese banking firm during the elder Biden’s term as vice president. OR MANY OBSERVERS, the defeat of Moving away from the strictly political, there is Communism in the Soviet Union and eco- a different and far less critical controversy involving nomic reforms in China spelled the begin- the National Basketball Association and the govern- ning of a final global victory for Western ment of China. That sorry tale began on October 4, liberalism. The most famous expositor when Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey of this idea was Francis Fukuyama, who tweeted out his support for the pro-democracy pro- F argued in in his National Interest essay “The End of testers in Hong Kong who had organized in opposi- History?” in 1989 (and later in book form): “What we tion to Chinese authoritarianism. Soon after Morey’s may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, tweet, the NBA’s official Chinese broadcast partner, a or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, company called Tencent, announced it would suspend but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of all business with the Rockets. There followed Chi- mankind’s ideological evolution and the universaliza- nese boycott campaigns and endorsement retractions tion of Western liberal democracy as the final form of aimed at punishing the team. It turns out that China, human government.” according to the New York Times, is the NBA’s “second- Fukuyama never said that struggles would most important market” after the United States. And cease between nations. Rather, he asserted that in the the Chinese response to Morey’s tweet could cost the realm of “consciousness,” Western liberal democracy Rockets as much as $25 million in sponsorships and had proved itself more enduring than its chief ideo- other revenue. logical competitors in the 20th century, fascism and Morey deleted the offending tweet while many Communism. We won. They lost. in the league offered apologies of one sort or another. For the United States, the main questions of This included a tweet from Rockets owner Tilman foreign policy would no longer center on containing Fertitta, saying that “@dmorey does NOT speak for or defeating Communism but would rather be about the @Houston Rockets.” Heaven forbid that a suc- how best to facilitate the large-scale shift toward lib- cessful American enterprise be associated with the erty that was already under way. The answers revolved words “fight for freedom.” around directing economic aid and venture capital to A common thread connects our president’s the evolving markets in China and the former Soviet dangling aid before an Eastern European leader in Union. Chinese market reforms and the reborn Russia return for political favors, a vice president’s son who provided openings for the U.S. to invest, literally, in the gets paid by Ukrainian and Chinese firms, and the future freedom of these countries. NBA’s moral collapse before Beijing. That thread is To do business with China or the former So- part of a great unraveling—the loosening and fraying viet Union was to promote what President Bill Clinton of our national purpose and resolve following the called “market democracy.” One version or another collapse of the Soviet Union. of the libertarian notion that free markets create free In the wake of the Berlin Wall’s destruction, people found purchase across the political spectrum. Americans sought to ramp up economic and political In a 1992 New York Times op-ed headlined “Help engagement with post-Soviet countries and China. Russia. Help Ourselves,” the influential Democratic Our reasons were both noble and self-interested—we Representative Dick Gephardt wrote, “The U.S. must could gain access to new markets and, by doing so, promote commercial ties with the Commonwealth of help to make these countries freer. The noble goal Independent States—an effort that will produce jobs of expanding freedom made our self-interest all the and rising living standards in all nations. That means more palatable. providing preferential trade status, using our oil in-
Commentary 17 dustry to develop commonwealth energy resources, tion has much to answer for. A few examples stand out. exporting computers and telecommunications prod- In the aftermath of the Cold War, weapons pro- ucts and aiding U.S. business investment in Russia liferation was a chief national-security concern for the and the other republics. Every day of delay endangers United States. Yet our enthusiastic policy of engage- democratization and market development as well as ment soon found us making dangerous compromises. costing American jobs and profits that will otherwise In 1992, China signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation end up in Japan or Europe.” He ended his piece thus: Treaty. But two years later, the press began reporting “If we summon the idealism that enabled the Marshall that the Chinese National Nuclear Corporation was Plan to succeed in the 1940’s, it would mean American at work on a secret and proscribed nuclear reactor in jobs and greater security in the 1990’s, an outcome that Pakistan, selling Islamabad technology to make bomb- sounds like ‘America first’ to me.” grade uranium, and had been contracted to build A similar argument, pertaining to China, was uranium plants for Iran. The Clinton administration stated plainly in 1999 by Henry S. Rowen of the con- grumbled and briefly halted $800 million in loans to servative Hoover Institution: “Without exception, rich the American companies Bechtel and Westinghouse, countries are democracies (more or less) and stay that which were working on a reactor for the Chinese way. Some poor countries are also democracies, but corporation. But after assurances from the Chinese most are not. And few of the poor democracies stay government, the U.S. approved the loans and granted democratic over time. Although the progression isn’t visas for engineers from the firm. always smooth, the historical pattern is clear: As coun- Then, in 1995, the Clinton administration tries get richer, they become more democratic. The struck a $500-million-plus deal with the Chinese Asian nations are no exception.” Great Wall Industry Corp., a firm owned by the Chi- It’s been a long sad fall from that hopeful idea to nese military, that guaranteed it bidding rights to our implicitly accepting Beijing’s authoritarian domi- work on the launch of U.S. satellites. This not only nation of Hong Kong as the price of doing business encouraged further Chinese proliferation; it gave with China. But it’s not as if there were no warning China access to the technology that it would soon use signs. In fact, the U.S. began to lose its way almost as to point missiles at Taiwan. soon as it set out to write a new chapter in the history As for human rights in China, American con- of global freedom. Bill Clinton was America’s first tradictions were also visible from the outset. In 1992, post–Cold War president, and we can trace many of President Bill Clinton signed an executive order re- our recent woes back to decisions made during his quiring that China ease up on its domestic repression two terms in office. if it wanted to continue enjoying its most-favored- nation trade status in the United States. But within a MERICAN GOVERNMENT and in- year, he went ahead and granted the Chinese most-fa- dustry were supposed to make aid vored-nation status while acknowledging that Beijing and business opportunities in China hadn’t met the demands he had made. and the former Soviet Union con- In 1998, not even a decade after the Tiananmen tingent on further reforms and Square massacre, the Clinton administration vowed improvements in the countries that not to criticize China at a UN human-rights meeting A sought our help. That way, international engagement in Geneva. When Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng would improve the quality of life for those living in came to visit the U.S. that same year to speak about these countries while serving American national- human-rights abuses in China, he evinced a keen un- security interests. This meant deeper involvement derstanding of American indifference. “I wouldn’t call in the political affairs of slippery regimes. But those the American attitude towards China abnormal,” he regimes proved uncommonly adept at hiding their said. “Once a country achieves democracy and mate- transgressions—and once money started flowing rial wealth, it often finds it difficult to understand the back to the U.S., American businesses and adminis- problems of other societies. That is why we in China trations became uncommonly adept at looking the relied on ourselves to build democracy, rather than other way. calling on the West for support.” Bit by bit, instead of these foreign governments Things have remained more or less the same raising their standards, we lowered ours. This started up to the present. Some American companies have long before Daryl Morey was headline news and before struggled to find the right balance between doing busi- Twitter was even conceivable. When it comes to ignor- ness and doing good. The most emblematic example of ing Chinese troublemaking, the Clinton administra- American industry’s thorny position in regard to Chi-
18 The Failure at the End of History : December 2019 nese human-rights abuses consistent and dangerous comes from Google, whose THE COUNTRIES OF bully in the South China founding motto—“Don’t THE FORMER SOVIET Seas, a fierce competitor be evil”—has since been among great nations for abandoned. The Silicon UNION ARE VERY power and profit across Valley behemoth dove DIFFERENT FROM ONE the globe, and the world’s head-first into the Chinese number-one source of in- market and soon came up ANOTHER, tellectual-property theft. against the jarring reality BUT CORRUPTION Most important, the Chi- of government repression. nese Communist Party has Chinese Google users IS A MAINSTAY OF had no problem adapting were perpetually hacked THEM ALL. its modes of oppression and surveilled from inside and aggression to fit the China. Additionally, China free market. And we’ve regularly censored its In- grown accustomed to it. ternet and blocked popular The mixed motive behind websites such as Facebook. our post–Cold War engage- At first, Google played along, ment with China—profit censoring its own search re- and democracy promo- sults to satisfy Beijing. But in tion—has become decid- 2010, the company decided edly less mixed. it could no longer be a party to these abuses and shut down its search site in China. It HE COUNTRIES of the former Soviet didn’t, however, pull its research-and-development teams Union are very different from one an- from working there. In August 2018, news outlets reported other, but corruption is a mainstay of that Google was at work on a new censored search engine them all. Though Communism col- called Dragonfly to be used in China. But four months lapsed as the official economic and later, the company abandoned the project after internal governing system, the unofficial sys- debates about the ethics of once again submitting to T tem of graft, along with nontransparency and thug- Chinese censorship. Like the U.S. more broadly, Google gery, lives on. As Michael Mandelbaum wrote in the sought to do no evil in its business dealings with China American Interest, “in its political and economic con- and found it impossible. What it will do next is unknown, sequences…large-scale corruption has the same effects but it’s clear from the company’s persistent efforts that it as Communism, which, in the last century, fostered will be itching to get back—somehow—into the lucrative repressive governments and sub-optimal economic Chinese search-engine market. performances where Communists gained power.” One Other Silicon Valley companies, for all their result of infusing corrupt countries with vast sums of professed idealism and messianic moralizing, seem money is that it enables unprincipled rulers to enjoy entirely at ease with the reality of Chinese oppression. the popularity that comes from “economic growth,” LinkedIn does big business in China by catering to cen- leaving aside issues such as accountability and hu- sors’ whims. Apple doesn’t offer a Taiwan-flag emoji to man freedom. Another is that wealth gets funneled users in mainland China lest the company upset the to those who game the system. This is quite the Chinese government, which doesn’t recognize Taiwan- opposite of what we’d hoped for in the immediate ese independence. To make matters worse, as protest- aftermath of the Cold War, and it’s made Russia itself ers marched for freedom in Hong Kong, the company a booming kleptocracy. decided to pull the Taiwanese flag from user keyboards Signs of the coming trouble, again, were visible there as well. During the same period, Paypal an- in the 1990s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, nounced that it would enter the Chinese marketplace. the United States became the world’s largest private China is certainly less authoritarian than it was in investor in Russia, with the overwhelming majority 1989, but it is far more oppressive than most Americans of that investment going into extracting Russian oil care to admit. And Fukuyama was entirely too sanguine and gas. But the Russian energy industry was in the when he wrote in his seminal essay that “Chinese com- hands of well-connected, enterprising, and unscru- petitiveness and expansionism on the world scene have pulous businessmen who worked hand-in-hand with virtually disappeared.” In this century, China has been a Russian officials to make fortunes and then stashed
Commentary 19 their earnings outside of closely associated with fig- the country. It was in ures connected to Donald the 1990s that the term Trump’s 2016 presidential “oligarch” first came into campaign and involved popular usage. in the early days of his Vice President Al administration. This in- Gore played a large and cludes, most notably, the important role in defin- AS WITH ALL POLICIES, case of Paul Manafort. ing Russian deviancy down THE AMERICAN PUSH A seasoned Repub- while encouraging Ameri- lican political operative, can investment in the for- FOR MARKET DEMOCRACY Manafort is the Ameri- mer Soviet Union. Begin- HAD UNINTENDED can poster boy for cashing ning in 1993, Gore, along in on post-Soviet lucre. with Russia’s then prime CONSEQUENCES— Prior to joining the Trump minister, Victor Cherno- CONSEQUENCES campaign, Manafort made myrdin, co-chaired the THAT AIM RIGHT AT THE millions of dollars advis- Gore-Chernomyrdin Com- ing Victor Yanukovych, mission, which handled a HEART OF OUR SENSE OF who served as Ukraine’s good deal of U.S.–Russia THE UNITED STATES AS president from 2010 to trade and energy nego- 2014. Yanukovych, a con- tiations. Before becoming A FREEDOM-LOVING summate political thug, prime minister, Cherno- NATION OF LAWS. attempted to steal an elec- myrdin was head of Gaz- tion and likely poisoned prom, Russia’s mostly one political opponent. He state-owned gas company. This put him in the orbit of was also staunchly pro-Russia and a devoted ally of the oligarchs, as Robert Bartley went on to note in the Vladimir Putin's. After Yanukovych was ousted from Wall Street Journal: “twice-yearly photo-ops with Mr. office, Manafort worked to rehabilitate the kleptocrat’s Gore and Mr. Chernomyrdin served to identify the ‘oli- image both in Eastern Europe and the West. During garchs’ with the U.S. and with capitalist reform.” this period, according to documents found in Kiev, Ya- Optics were the least of it. For years, Russian nukovych’s Party of Regions paid Manafort some $12.7 officials failed to institute the kind of market reforms million dollars in cash. that the Clinton administration was hoping for, and In 2017, Manafort was indicted on multiple for years, Washington turned its head. Unnamed C.I.A. charges connected to his time working for Yanukovych officials told theNew York Times that, in 1995, they and his laundering of the vast off-the-books sums he re- gave Gore a dossier on Chernomyrdin and corruption ceived. In March 2019, he was sentenced to 47 months only to have it returned with a “barnyard epithet” writ- in prison. He pled guilty to, among other things, two ten on it. Corroborating accounts say the word was charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States. “bullshit,” written in Gore’s hand. In 1997, less than a What is perhaps more concerning than year before Russia’s massive financial crisis, Gore pre- Manafort’s overt crime is the effect that his pro-Yan- dicted a “surge of investment” in the Russian market. ukovych/pro-Russia work has had on American poli- And that was all before the emergence of Vladi- tics. Documents newly released by the FBI show that mir Putin. Putin, the revanchist Russian strongman, it was Manafort who pushed the idea that Russia’s in his effort to reclaim the countries in Russia’s “near 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee abroad,” has “weaponized kleptocracy,” in the words email servers was actually a Ukrainian operation. of the Hudson Institute’s Marius Laurinavicˇius. As When Trump moved to withhold U.S. military aid to Joe Biden himself put it in 2015, “the Kremlin is Ukraine, lest we forget, the president made it clear working hard to buy off and co-opt European political to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he forces, funding both right-wing and left-wing anti- wanted Ukraine to look into this very conspiracy systemic parties throughout Europe.” theory. If there was, in fact, a quid pro quo under way, Has Putin aimed his kleptocracy gun at the Unit- this constituted half of the quid. ed States? Yes. And how has the U.S. responded? In Another prominent Trump figure who advanced certain key instances, very poorly. This is most evident the theory that Ukraine was responsible for the DNC in the tangle of suspicious or downright dirty deals hack, according to the FBI, was Michael Flynn, who
20 The Failure at the End of History : December 2019 has his own unfortunate monetary connection to Vlad- None of this is to say that, on balance, the Ameri- imir Putin. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general can urge, after the Cold War, to nurture freedom and who had been head of the Defense Intelligence Agency good governance abroad was wrong. In fact, it’s hard under Barack Obama, served briefly as Trump’s first to imagine a better alternative. We can’t know what national-security adviser. In 2015, Flynn sat next to China or former Soviet states would look like today Vladimir Putin at a gala dinner in Moscow in honor had we taken a more reticent approach to their eco- of Russia’s state-owned RT television network. At nomic and political development. The persistence of the event, Flynn gave a speech for which he was paid Chinese aggression and censorship and post-Soviet $45,000. He resigned as national-security adviser in corruption indicates, however, that no magical hands- February 2017 amid reports that he’d misled the FBI free transformation was ever in the offing. about his communication with Russian ambassador to As with all policies, the American push for mar- the United States, Sergey Kislyak. In December of that ket democracy had unintended consequences—conse- year, as part of a plea agreement, he pleaded guilty to quences that aim right at the heart of our sense of the “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious, and United States as a freedom-loving nation of laws. This fraudulent statements” to the FBI. is not to say that the U.S. is “just like everybody else” Mike Flynn is no Russian operative. And I think now. Paul Manafort is in jail for his crimes, and Joe far too much has been made of his case. But a gen- Biden has to reckon with his son’s cashing in. But we’ve eration ago, someone in his position would never have picked up a few bad habits from those we’d hoped to taken a cent to appear alongside the Russian strong- help, and those habits have taken a toll, not least psy- man in Moscow. It would have been, and still should chologically, on the nation. be, an assault on his own dignity. But influential It is often said that democracy and good gover- Americans have become so routinized in such dealings nance can’t be exported just anywhere, that they’re that they hardly trouble our consciences at all. too fragile and require special conditions to survive. Similarly, someone in Joe Biden’s position, in an But there’s a corollary to this: Corruption and the earlier age, would have known that his son’s getting abuse of power are not easily contained. They’ll find $50,000 a month to serve on the board of a Ukrainian purchase where they can. The result is this strange energy firm was, at least, unseemly. The same goes for epilogue to the “end of history.” There’s still no wor- Hunter Biden’s time on the board of BHR Equity In- thy ideological rival to Western liberalism, but we’ve vestment Fund Management Co., whose largest share- managed to make the victory feel far less glorious holder is the state-controlled Bank of China. than it once did.q
Commentary 21 The Forgotten Proto-Zionist The visionary life of Warder Cresson By Michael Medved
SRAEL’S contemporary critics angrily in- His name was Warder Cresson, and he led an extraor- sist that the special relationship between dinary and singular American life. America and the Jewish state stems solely Cresson’s own Huguenot forebears first came from the outsize electoral and economic to the New World from Holland in 1657, settling in clout of American Jews. But those who argue Delaware and New York. After some adventures in the that this undue influence has always shaped West Indies, his grandfather Solomon found his way to our policies in the Middle East ignore the Philadelphia, where he became an ardent member of fact that the commitment to a rebuilt Jerusalem and a the Society of Friends and part of the new city’s Quaker rebornI Israel began at a time when the republic’s Jew- establishment. As successful artisans and entrepre- ish community played an insignificant role in national neurs, the Cressons owned prime real estate on Chest- life, with a minimal population amounting to far less nut Street in the center of town as well as valuable ag- than 1 percent of the federal total. In fact, the idea that ricultural properties in the surrounding countryside. the United States ought to link its fate to a Jewish state Born in 1798, Cresson began working the family officially originated in 1844 with the very first diplo- farms in nearby Darby and Chester counties at age 17, mat America ever dispatched to Jerusalem, more than impressing relatives and neighbors with his business a century before Israel’s Declaration of Independence. and leadership abilities. Married at 23 to another de- vout Quaker, he proceeded to raise six children of his This is the second excerpt Commentary has run own and to follow the clan’s pattern of judicious invest- from Michael Medved’s new book, God’s Hand ment and accumulation of wealth. on America, published by Crown Forum. The first, “‘I As he approached 30, however, religious doubts Will Make of You a Great Nation,’” was published last began to torment him, and he published outspokenly month. His three-hour radio program airs daily. radical religious tracts (including Babylon the Great Is
22 December 2019 Cresson reached the conclusion that God himself had created the United States for one purpose above all others: rescuing the Jews of the world from exile and oppression.
Falling!) that questioned his Quaker faith, challenging pointment as America’s first consul to Jerusalem. At its perceived emphasis on “an outward form, order of the time, the Holy City that loomed so large in religious discipline” without proper attention to the “inward imagery had degenerated into a run-down, isolated man.” Cresson formally rejected the Society of Friends village of barely 15,000 souls (half of them Jewish) and affiliated himself with a series of unconventional that hardly merited its own consulate by any conven- sects that had arisen during America’s second “Great tional calculation. But Representative Morris wrote to Awakening,” including, in turn, the Shakers, the Mor- Secretary of State John C. Calhoun that the American mons, the Seventh-day Adventists, and the “Camp- pilgrims and missionaries who visited Jerusalem in bellites,” who believed in restoring the united, purified increasing numbers could benefit from a diplomatic Christianity of the apostles. outpost in that remote corner of the Ottoman Empire. In the process, Cresson developed a local repu- More important, he made it clear that Warder Cresson, tation for sharing his insights and inspirations by relying on his personal wealth, had volunteered to “haranguing in the streets” of Philadelphia. With his work for the government without compensation. flowing black beard and burning blue eyes, he cut a This was an offer that the perennially cash- formidable, unforgettable figure, frightening unsus- strapped State Department could hardly refuse, so the pecting passersby with stentorian warnings about official appointment came through on May 17, 1844. God’s wrath and the imminent apocalypse. Cresson set out immediately, ready to make a decisive Inevitably, this agitated religious seeker found break with his past. He wrote in his diary at the time of his way to Mikveh Israel, the city’s leading Jewish his departure: “In the Spring of 1844 I left everything congregation, where he received an unexpectedly near and dear to me on earth. I left the wife of my warm reception from the ardent abolitionist and influ- youth and six lovely children (dearer to me than my ential scholar Isaac Leeser. As the synagogue’s leader, natural life), and an excellent farm, with everything Leeser patiently engaged Cresson in wide-ranging comfortable around me. I left all these in the pursuit of discussions on biblical interpretation and messianic truth, and for the sake of Truth alone.” redemption while introducing him to the work of Mor- decai Manuel Noah, a Jewish political operative and LMOST IMMEDIATELY, protests arose over man of letters who had begun pushing for an Ameri- the suitability of the selection of this relent- can commitment to reestablish a Jewish homeland in A less truth-seeker for a new diplomatic post. the Middle East. Samuel D. Ingham, of New Hope, Pennsylvania, who Cresson became instantly captivated by that had been treasury secretary under President Andrew idea and reached the conclusion that “there is no Jackson, wrote to Calhoun: “The papers have recently salvation for the Gentiles but by coming to Israel.” announced the appointment of Warder Cresson, Con- He also reached the conclusion that God himself sul to Jerusalem. This man…has been laboring under had created the United States for one purpose above an aberration of mind for many years; his mania is of all others: rescuing the Jews of the world from exile the religious species. He was born a Quaker, wanted and oppression. He discerned profound significance to be a preacher…and has gone round the compass in the young republic’s national symbol, since the from one job to another, sometimes preaching about prophet Isaiah had promised for the weary and the church doors and in the streets; his passion is for fainthearted that “the Lord will renew their strength; religious controversy…but, in truth, he is withal a very they will soar on wings like eagles.” He felt sure that weak-minded man and his mind, what there is of it, the prophecy of a reborn Israel would be fulfilled by quite out of order…. His appointment is made a theme the soaring power of the American eagle that would of ridicule by all who know him.” “overshadow the land with his wings.” Calhoun responded to this alarming dispatch by To assure his own role in these miraculous forth- writing to Cresson and announcing, in President John coming events, he contacted a friendly Philadelphia Tyler’s name, that the government would not sponsor congressman named E. Joy Morris to arrange his ap- the establishment of a Jerusalem consulate after all. By
Commentary 23 He issued a sweeping proclamation to all the Jews of the Holy City to assure them that they would henceforth enjoy the firm protection of the American government. that time, the idealistic emissary had already departed upsurge in either emigrants or tourists but did draw for the Holy Land, where he disembarked melodra- enough attention so that he followed it with other matically from a British ship at the port of Jaffa, step- book-length pamphlets combining reportage with ping ashore with an American flag in one hand and a religious argument. caged dove of peace in the other. Those arguments began drawing the peripatetic Quickly establishing himself as the official repre- would-be consul far from his Christian roots, especial- sentative of the United States, he created a new consul- ly as he became personally engaged with the leading ar seal and issued a sweeping proclamation to all the Sephardic rabbis in Jerusalem. At age 49, after seven Jews of the Holy City to assure them that they would years of study and contemplation, after intoxicating henceforth enjoy the firm protection of the American exploration of the shrines and byways of the God- government. But before Cresson could do much to give haunted Judean hills and the shores of the tranquil meaning to that promise, word finally reached him Sea of Galilee, Warder Cresson reached the most con- that his appointment had been canceled at the highest sequential decision of a turbulent life. levels in Washington. “I remained in Jerusalem in my former faith un- For Cresson, this news constituted only a minor til the 28th day of March, 1848,” he wrote, “when I be- inconvenience: He enjoyed the title of consul far too came fully satisfied that I never could obtain Strength much to give it up and continued to present himself as and Rest, but by doing as Ruth did, and saying to her the envoy of the American Republic, however dubious Mother-in-Law, or Naomi (The Jewish Church), ‘En- his claims. The bemused Turkish authorities mostly treat me not to leave thee … for whither thou goest I shrugged at his pretensions, while no other American will go. In short … I was circumcised, entered the Holy officials bothered to travel to the remote region to Covenant and became a Jew.” raise uncomfortable questions about his status. Meanwhile, Cresson took great satisfaction in URING the course of this transition, he had hosting visiting dignitaries and startling them with been writing to his wife and children to keep his increasingly elaborate and grandiose plans for D them informed of his spiritual progress—and reconfiguring the Middle East and, ultimately, the of his new name, Michael Boaz Israel ben Avraham. rest of the globe. He welcomed the British novelist He had no desire to abandon the family that he “loved William Makepeace Thackeray and informed him most dearly above anything else on earth” and felt that the United States would work closely with the certain that he could persuade them to share the satis- United Kingdom to enlist the other powers of Europe factions of his new faith and to return with him to his in establishing a promising, prosperous new home- mystical mission in Zion. land for the Jewish people. Sailing back to Philadelphia just two months The author of Vanity Fair remained singularly after completing his conversion, the former consul unimpressed by this preposterous scheme. “He has received a devastating reception from his nearest and no other knowledge of Syria but what he derives from dearest. His wife, Elizabeth, had taken sole possession prophecy,” reported Thackeray. “I doubt whether any of their property, selling off the family farm as well government has received or appointed so queer an as Warder’s personal effects. She ignored his appeals ambassador.” As if the conversational initiatives didn’t for a settlement and joined other family members in count as queer enough, there were also his increasing- lodging a formal charge of “lunacy” against him. A ly ebullient writings. Shortly after his arrival, Cresson “sheriff’s jury” of six men quickly agreed with their ar- hastily penned a glowing paean to his new hometown, guments and issued its verdict of insanity, but Cresson, describing in rapturous terms the ancient but squalid who never spent a day in an asylum, challenged their village that most other visitors viewed as dirty and decision in court. decrepit. Jerusalem, the Centre and Joy of the Whole The resulting trial lasted for almost three years, Earth, published in Philadelphia and London at included more than 100 witnesses, and became a Cresson’s direction, failed to inspire a measurable national sensation. Aside from the obvious attempt
24 The Forgotten Proto-Zionist : December 2019 The leaders of the nation’s Jewish community testified on Cresson’s behalf, resisting the notion that conversion to Judaism in any way constituted evidence of insanity. by a frustrated and embittered wife to seize what remained of her wandering husband’s wealth, the dispute involved the government’s power to stig- matize and punish a citizen’s midlife decision to embrace an ancient faith. Cresson fiercely defended his right to select his own religious path, no matter how exotic or bizarre its practices might seem to his former neighbors. Esteemed physicians, theologians, and legal scholars gave testimony on both sides. While no one denied Cresson’s reputation as “a strange bird” (in the words of one reporter), the leaders of the nation’s small Jewish community testified on his behalf, resist- ing the notion that conversion to Judaism in any way constituted automatic evidence of insanity. Cresson’s lawyer, the eminent Horatio Hubbell Jr., characterized the case as a crucial test of the religious liberty guaran- teed by the First Amendment. His impassioned closing statement ended with a dramatic denunciation of the attempt to discredit an unconventional thinker based on his religious ideas alone. “The only charge left with which to accuse my client,” he thundered, “is that he became a Jew.” By that time, the newspapers covering the trial had swung to support of Cresson’s cause, and they unani- mously expressed their jubilation at his vindication. Philadelphia’s Public Ledger saw the decision as “settling forever … the principle that a man’s ‘religious opinions’ never can be made the test of his sanity.” Having overturned the prior verdict of lunacy, A portrait of Warder Cresson, circa 1840. the court enabled the newly minted Michael Boaz Is- (Courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society, rael ben Avraham to continue worshipping at Philadel- New York and Newton Center, Mass.) phia’s Mikveh Israel Congregation, where he enjoyed the status of local hero and meticulously followed than 80 years before Hitler’s rise to power, offers one Jewish religious law. He used his last months in the more example of Cresson’s haunting insights and United States to pen a spiritual autobiography filled premonitions, which became increasingly insepa- with exultant, sometimes terrifying prophecies, pre- rable from his overwhelming weirdness and uncom- dicting the imminent rebirth of the Land of Israel and promising oddity. the ingathering of the exiles, despite unimaginable trials and terrors. ITHIN A YEAR of his trial’s successful The cover for his publication showed a sketch conclusion, he divorced his wife and re- of a human heart, consumed by flame, locked within W turned to Jerusalem in 1852 with a new the traditional six-pointed Star of David. The title mission: to restore the Land of Israel by restoring the proclaimed: THE SHIELD OF DAVID: HOLOCAUST land itself. He used his background as a “practical TO THE UNITY OF GOD AND TO DAVID THE MES- farmer” to argue that the establishment of scien- SIAH. The peculiar use of the term “holocaust,” more tifically sophisticated agricultural settlements could
Commentary 25 He came to believe that by recreating a Jewish state to inspire the world, America could simultaneously save itself from approaching disunion over the issue of slavery. remake the ancient earth of Judea at the same time for that miracle. He also came to believe that by re- that they reshaped the Jewish soul. Working the creating a Jewish state to inspire the world, America land, he averred, “is the one true foundation, the could simultaneously save itself from approaching dis- proper beginning and basis for all the other sciences union over the tormenting issue of slavery. “God hath and arts, the foundation for all of life’s needs and liv- chosen Zion…as the centre and joy of the whole world,” ing conditions.” he wrote, and “there cannot be unity and harmony… His determination to plant model colonies without this concentration.” amid the desolate landscape and to achieve national redemption through tireless farming not only an- N 1860, on the verge of the American Civil War that ticipated future Zionist pioneers by nearly half a Warder Cresson both dreaded and predicted, the century but seemed distinctly, decisively American Ialways vigorous and outspoken Michael Boaz Israel in its ambitious, against-the-odds vision. He raised ben Avraham took suddenly ill with an undiagnosed money to purchase a substantial empty tract of land malady. After 12 days of ebbing strength, he passed on near Jaffa (today’s Tel Aviv) and another significant the Sabbath day at age 62. The newspapers of the time parcel known as Emek Refaim (Valley of the Heal- reported the burial of the onetime diplomat as a signifi- ers) outside Jerusalem’s Old City—which is today an cant civic occasion, with all Jewish businesses in Jerusa- elegant, cosmopolitan neighborhood that’s home to lem closed in his honor. A long line of mourners trudged numerous American immigrants to Israel, including up the steep slope of the Mount of Olives in the autumn my brother Jonathan. season of the High Holy Days to grant him “such honors In Cresson’s era, on the other hand, visiting Yan- as are paid only to a prominent rabbi.” Unfortunately, kees saw a far less appealing prospect. In 1856, a frus- neither of his two Jerusalem-born children—Avigail trated 37-year-old writer, depressed by the disappointing Ruth and David Ben-Zion—survived to adulthood, both response to his ambitious novel Moby Dick, borrowed dying within three years of their American father. With- money and made his way to the Middle East. Though he out descendants to tend to his gravesite, its location, hoped for inspiration from the Holy Land’s sacred soil, like memories of the consul’s remarkable role, was lost Herman Melville saw only “the emptiness of the lifeless to history for some five generations. antiquity of Jerusalem” where “the migrant Jews are like In 2013, however, renewed interest in the dis- flies that have taken up their abode in a skull.” putes and oddities of Warder Cresson’s turbulent life He sought out one of those tenacious flies: led to the rediscovery of his damaged but still-identi- the famous former American, Warder Cresson, now fiable gravestone. It turned up among the relics in the remarried to a Sephardic Jewish woman and rais- crowded and ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives, ing their two young children in a devoutly observant where it was suitably restored as a small memorial not home. In lengthy arguments recorded in his journal, long before his two homelands took the joint historic Melville contemptuously rejected the former consul’s step of establishing the first American Embassy in soaring schemes of establishing cooperative farms to Cresson’s holy capital of Jerusalem. transform physical and spiritual realities. “The idea of His contemporaries had dismissed him as a making farmers of the Jews is vain,” he wrote. “In the “strange bird,” but Warder Cresson anticipated the first place, Judea is a desert, with few exceptions. In the Zionist visions that later changed the world while second place, the Jews hate farming…and besides the advancing the idea that America’s destiny prov- number of Jews in Palestine is comparatively small. identially connected her to a restored Israel. After his And how are the hosts of them scattered in other lands death, the miraculous events that unfolded in and to be brought here? Only by a miracle.” around his Jerusalem home also established him as Cresson had long maintained that the United the posthumous but indisputable winner of his pro- States alone could serve as the anointed instrument phetic arguments with Herman Melville.q
26 The Forgotten Proto-Zionist : December 2019 The Anti-Hitler Movie That Was Never Made The fascinating tale of The Mad Dog of Europe By Sydney Ladensohn Stern
N MARCH 1933, Herman J. Mankiewicz, a portrait of American culture in the years leading up a respected Hollywood screenwriter and to World War II and the obstacles facing those who producer, took a leave of absence from shared his prescience. Metro Goldwyn Mayer to write a screenplay Set in “Transylvania,” The Mad Dog of Europe has about Adolf Hitler. The former New York two storylines. The first tracks the rise of housepainter newspaperman, playwright, theater critic, “Adolf Mitler.” The second follows a pair of families, and Algonquin Table habitué was known for one Jewish and one Christian, who live in Gronau, his sophistication and irreverent wit. But Mankiewicz Transylvania (Gronau was an actual German town). was alsoI deeply political, and as he watched the Nazis The screenplay opens with an “earnest and impres- tighten their stranglehold on Germany, he understood sive” voice reciting: “This picture is produced in the the implications and felt he had to act. Abandoning interests of Democracy, an ideal which has inspired his usual ironic detachment, he wrote The Mad Dog of the noblest deeds of man. It has been the goal towards Europe in a desperate attempt to awaken the American which nations have aspired—one after the other hav- public to the danger of Hitler’s rise to power. The story ing asserted a determination to overthrow tyrants of his screenplay’s ultimately fruitless journey offers and erect a government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’ Today the greater part of the civilized Sydney Ladensohn Stern is a writer in New York world has reached this stage of enlightenment.” City. This is adapted from her new book, The Brothers Onscreen is: “THE INCIDENTS AND CHAR- Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Clas- ACTERS IN THIS PICTURE ARE OF COURSE FICTI- sics, just out from the University Press of Missouri. TIOUS. IT IS OBVIOUSLY ABSURD TO ASK ANYONE
Commentary 27 TO BELIEVE THEY COULD HAPPEN IN THIS EN- HEINRICH (parroting Mitler): No Jew can be LIGHTENED DAY AND AGE.” a Transylvanian. To accompany the sarcastic disclaimer, Mankie- They are enemies of Transylvania—parasites wicz wanted the haunting melody of the Kol Nidre, the feeding on Transylvania’s blood. prayer associated with the holiest day of the Jewish ILSA ( furiously): How dare you say that? My year, “with the military phrases of DEUTSCHLAND brothers died for Transylvania. ÜBER ALLES audible as an undertone.” Then, “a large swastika fills the screen, upon which the title is super- When this momentarily stops Heinrich, Mitler, imposed. The swastika gradually fades to the form of a who has been watching, tells him, “Don’t lower your- cross with a figure crucified upon it.” self by arguing with a Jew.” After they leave, Fritz tells Ilsa that Heinrich is like so many others who came back from the A close-up of Mitler’s arm ‘sawing up war, “beaten—hurt…they want and down with a paintbrush’ dissolves to hurt someone else to get even.” into an arm ‘still going up and down When Ilsa worries that they will get into power, Fritz without brush,’ in a beer hall. laughs: “Here in Transylvania? How could they? They don’t The first story opens in 1914 in the middle-class even make sense. No thinking person would listen to Gronau home of Professor Mendelssohn, his wife, their them. They go around making speeches to each other daughter, and three sons. When their oldest son, Karl, and being put in jail.” They confess their feelings for announces that he has enlisted to fight in the Great each other, but Ilsa refuses to marry Fritz because be- War, his father endorses his patriotism. ing married to a Jew could make life difficult for him. The second opens on a pair of housepainters, Fritz prevails. with the “dark little fellow” (Adolf Mitler) getting his Real and fake newsreels and trick shots convey colleague fired. A close-up of Mitler’s arm “sawing up events from 1924 to 1929, including “shots of Nazi dis- and down with a paintbrush” dissolves into an arm turbances being quelled by police clubs…to show the “still going up and down without brush,” in a beer hall. illegitimacy of the movement.” And “famous Ameri- Mitler’s first audible line is, “The French are a nation of cans arriving in Transylvania …i.e., Dempsey, W.R. niggers. We must exterminate them.” Hearst, Charlie Chaplin, etc.” Back in Gronau, little Ilsa Mendelssohn plays To depict the 1929 “world crash,” Mankiewicz with Heinrich and Fritz Schmidt, whose father owns wanted newsreel footage of panics and bank closings, the local newspaper. Ilsa’s two older brothers die in followed by another trick shot: “Money being sucked the war, and Heinrich enlists. When the war ends, back from Transylvania. Under the force of this suction Heinrich returns, bitter and angry. Newsreel shots several cracks appear in the surface. Across the bottom depict scenes of unemployment, and before Heinrich of the film the rats are swarming. As the cracks widen, leaves Gronau to make a name for himself, he asks Ilsa they swarm up through them to the top, overrunning to marry him when he returns. Ilsa agrees out of pity, the whole surface.” though she actually loves his brother Fritz. Then: impressionistic shots of Mitler address- The two narratives merge when Heinrich be- ing larger and larger groups of people. Following comes Mitler’s follower and watches him develop his milestones such as the Reichstag fire and “Mitler’s” political party. After a re-creation of the 1923 Beer Hall election, Herman wanted a public book-burning scene Putsch that sent Hitler to jail and inadvertently gave like those held all over Germany in May 1933, to show- him the opportunity to write Mein Kampf, Heinrich ac- case Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western companies Mitler to a country-club-like prison where Front—“a traitor to Transylvania—and still alive!” Ilsa and Fritz visit him. Albert Einstein’s Quantum Theory—“a Jew…and still alive!” Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, HEINRICH (proudly): I have learned what it Upton Sinclair…and finally, the Bible. means to be a Transylvanian. Under Mitler, Heinrich returns to run Gronau ILSA: I’m a Transylvanian, too! and encounters his father. The two embrace, then HEINRICH (bitterly): You’re a Jew! begin to argue. When a four-year-old boy wanders in, ILSA (stunned): What— Heinrich teaches him to give the Nazi salute and say
28 The Anti-Hitler Movie That Was Never Made : December 2019 “Heil Mitler.” Once Ilsa and Fritz appear, Heinrich real- had acquired the rights to Mankiewicz’s “anti-Hitler izes with horror that the boy is theirs. “You’re through motion picture depicting the sacrifices of the Jews and with her,” he tells Fritz. “With her and her Jewish brat.” Catholics in a Central European Nation and the indig- Professor Mendelssohn is harassed in the street. nities to which they are being subjected.” Jaffe also In his classroom, a little boy sits in a corner wearing a announced that he had resigned from RKO “to devote dunce cap with the word “JEW.” “His shirt is torn. He [his] entire time and attention to this project” and had screams as a pen strikes and imbeds itself in his shoul- hired “one of America’s foremost dramatists” to help. der. He pulls it out, wet with blood.” Another student Opposition was formidable. Although the stu- writes “My teacher is a Jew” on the blackboard. The dios’ top executives were almost all Jewish, they were students eventually drive teacher and student from well aware of anti-Semitism’s prevalence in American the classroom. culture and the dangers it posed to them. While lead- One of the headlines in Herr Schmidt’s newspa- ers in other industries were praised for fulfilling the per protests the firing of Professor Mendelssohn. An- American Dream, successful motion-picture busi- other announces: “MITLER DECREES ALL ARYANS ness executives were routinely portrayed as igno- MARRIED TO JEWS MUST SEPARATE OR BE SENT rant, jumped-up former garment merchants–“pants TO PRISON CAMPS.” pressers, delicatessen dealers, furriers, and penny After Ilsa’s brother Hans is killed, Fritz tries to showmen,” as Karl K. Kitchen wrote in Columbia, the convince her to cross the border. They learn that both official Knights of Columbus magazine. Rather than as their fathers have been killed, and Frau Mendelssohn captains of industry, they were characterized as “mo- shoots herself. guls”—Oriental, Asiatic despots. They were maligned They despair of finding a way out when Heinrich as greedy capitalists whose sensational products cor- arrives at Fritz and Ilsa’s, swastika flags waving on his rupted wholesome Christian Americans, especially official car. Handing them false passports, he urges during a time when the Depression fueled so many them to take his car. He will pretend they stole it. See- resentments. They knew that if they depicted Nazi ing his father killed was the turning point: “Before my abuses, they risked being branded as warmongers, try- eyes…I have been blind—insane. How could I think ing to pull the United States into a European problem that was the way to help Transylvania—by killing the to help their co-religionists. finest man that ever lived. And Herr Mendelssohn— Studio executives also faced economic pres- and Johann, and those thou- sands of others. But he made me see…” The producer Sam Jaffe took out full- As troops approach, Hein- page advertisements announcing that he rich assures Fritz and Ilsa he will try to join them at the frontier had acquired the rights to Mankiewicz’s and hands them a clutch of money. The Nazis begin to close ‘anti-Hitler motion picture.’ in, and Heinrich throws himself in their path. He dies shooting at them, and the story sure. Most of the major studios were owned by pub- ends with Fritz and Ilsa “speeding away to safety.” licly held corporations, so even if the studio chiefs wanted to proceed, their corporate bosses would not ROM the beginning, Mankiewicz understood allow them to jeopardize foreign markets. As one that the powers in Hollywood would consider historian put it, the motion-picture business was F the very idea of such a portrayal of those events “an industry largely financed by Protestant bankers, dangerously incendiary and assumed he would have operated by Jewish studio executives, and policed by to produce it himself. After telling the press he had Catholic bureaucrats, all the while claiming to repre- already arranged financial backing and distribution, sent grass-roots America.” he went to New York to find it. Despite prodigious ef- The Catholic bureaucrats in question staffed the fort, he failed, and because he could not afford to go industry’s trade organization, Motion Picture Produc- without a paycheck for long, Mankiewicz was back at ers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which was MGM by the end of June 1933. often called the Hays Office, after the organization’s In July, film producer Sam Jaffe, one of Mankie- president, Will H. Hays. Besides representing industry wicz’s closest friends, took out full-page advertise- interests, the MPPDA operated as a self-censoring body, ments in the trade newspapers announcing that he created by the industry to forestall national and local
Commentary 29 censorship efforts. MPPDA was supposed to be the in- “the esthetic tastes of the public” in mind and “for dustry’s advocate, but its employees’ sympathies ranged the same reason that Hollywood producers had made from well-meaning to avowedly anti-Semitic, and those Baby Face, Melody Cruise, and So This Is Africa.” With with the latter sympathies were not above exploiting his usual wit, Mankiewicz simultaneously repudiated Jewish studio executives’ apprehensions. When Nazis his and Jaffe’s obvious idealism; ridiculed the industry assaulted American Jewish employees of American for the triviality of its output; mocked the MPPDA for film companies and pushed them out of Germany in hypocrisy; and exposed its regulatory code as inef- 1933, the MPPDA spokesman presumably charged with fectual. All three of his examples were major studios’ protecting industry interests said only that “these men recent releases; all three were MPPDA-approved; and left the country willingly and have since returned to all three pushed sexual, rather than political, boundar- work there.” ies. Hays was not amused. As Jaffe set up an office and hired the playwright Lynn After Jaffe showed the Los Angeles ADL Root to work on the script, a the script, some members thought it number of Jewish organizations mobilized. They, too, wanted might be effective if toned down, but Americans informed about Hit- ler and the Nazis, but they officially the organization opposed it. wanted the word spread by non- Jewish messengers. The Anti- Created in 1930, the Code by which the MPPDA Defamation League (ADL), which had been organized regulated its members’ pictures reflected the Catholic in 1913 specifically to combat anti-Semitism, joined values of the Code’s creators, addressing issues of pro- studio heads and the MPPDA in actively opposing the fanity, alcohol and drug use, respect for clergy, nudity, realization of Mad Dog. They feared it would provoke sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, respect for the accusations of Jewish warmongering, and they wor- flag, miscegenation, and the sensibilities of other na- ried that if it failed commercially, it would demon- tions. MPPDA did not enforce it effectually until July strate American apathy to Hitler or even pave the way 15, 1934, when Hays’s assistant, Joseph I. Breen, took for pro-Nazi films. After Jaffe showed the Los Angeles charge of the MPPDA’s newly formed Production Code ADL the script, some members thought it might be Administration (PCA). That meant the Mad Dog script effective if toned down, but officially the organization was submitted during the interval between 1930 and opposed it. mid-1934, a period film historians now fondly recall as In August 1933, Mankiewicz and Jaffe con- Pre-Code Hollywood. During those early Depression ceded defeat. They might use the title at some future years, studios pursued diminishing audiences with time, Mankiewicz told a Los Angeles ADL official, increasingly sensational films and stories filled with but if they did, they would make it more a “newsreel gangsters, violence, and less censorious treatments of type” picture. ADL officials took the precaution of sexual mores. alerting potential sources of money anyway, in case A week after Jaffe’s announcement, Hays sum- Jaffe tried again. moned him and Mankiewicz to his office and accused By September, Jaffe also needed to get back to them of greed: They were exploiting “a scarehead work, so he sold Mad Dog rights to Al Rosen, a tough situation for the picture which, if made, might return agent eager to make his mark as a producer. Rosen them a tremendous profit while creating heavy losses went to Paris to meet with Billy Wilder, Paul Kohner, for the industry.” Then he asked, even if they were to and Sam Spiegel, all Austrian or Austro-Hungarians, find a studio willing to rent them production facilities, but he too was unable to secure funding. After that, how could they exhibit the film if all the major theaters Rosen embarked on one scheme after another, in- refused them? Jaffe responded that even if he had cluding hiring a Hitler lookalike to generate public- to contend with higher costs and lower revenues, he ity. Eventually, he convinced New York philanthropist would exhibit it in smaller theaters in lesser markets. Samuel Untermeyer to finance it, but ADL members Mankiewicz, who was as averse to admitting a interceded and Untermeyer withdrew. In October noble purpose as he was addicted to insulting more 1933, Herman Mankiewicz asked to have his name than one target at a time, undercut Jaffe’s honorable removed from the script. declaration by seeing and raising Hays’s accusation of Once the new Production Code went into effect (Jewish) greed. He said he had written Mad Dog with in mid-1934, Rosen had to deal with Joseph Breen, a
30 The Anti-Hitler Movie That Was Never Made : December 2019 known anti-Semite who pulled no punches. “Because and only against Herman Mankiewicz. of the large number of Jews active in the motion pic- The New York Times coyly speculated that since ture industry in this country, the charge is certain to his films “contained no references to the present be made that the Jews, as a class, are behind an anti- German Government or any of its officials,” perhaps Hitler picture and using the entertainment screen for its ad hominem ban was attributable to “the writer’s their own personal propaganda purposes,” Breen said. ‘non-Aryanism.’” Or might it be because “the writer “The entire industry, because of this, is likely to be in- contemplated a film production of ‘The Mad Dog of dicted for the action of a mere handful.” Some believed Europe’ a few years ago.” It was “generally understood” “that such a picture is an out-and-out propaganda pic- that he had abandoned the project “on the advice of ture” that “might establish a bad precedent. The pur- influential American Jews,” who feared “bitter conse- pose of the screen, primarily, is to entertain and not to quences for their coreligionists in Germany.” As the propagandize. To launch such a picture might result in only screenwriter the Nazis singled out, Mankiewicz a kind of two-edged sword, with the screen being used wore the distinction with honor. for propaganda purposes not so worthy, possibly as With membership in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi that suggested by THE MAD DOG OF EUROPE idea.” League exceeding 4,000 in 1936, Rosen approached As the ADL executives had feared, Breen ex- the U.S. State Department about the film and came plicitly suggested that anti-Semites deserved equal close to convincing Sol Lesser to produce it at RKO. time. “It is to be remembered that there is strong Then the State Department contacted the MPPDA, and pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country, Breen sent the State Department and Lesser his 1934 and, while those who are likely to approve of an anti- memo, and again killed the project. Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise,” In 1937 Rosen announced that after conduct- Breen said, “they should keep in mind that millions ing a poll to measure the appeal of an anti-Nazi film of Americans might think otherwise.” By then, he had with a script “by Herman Mankiewicz, Lynn Root and reinforcements. Nazi censors were already screening [Albert] Rosen,” he planned to proceed without the everything coming into Germany, but to stamp out blessing of a Production Code seal. Furthermore, he offending material at the source, they sent German would not reveal casting until shooting began, “be- consul Dr. Georg Gyssling to Hollywood to work with cause of the incident in which Dr. George Gyssling, studios on scripts before they were even produced. local German consul, figured in connection with ‘The Rosen did not give up. In 1935 Italy invaded Ethi- Road Back.’” When Universal adapted Erich Maria opia, at which time the press began referring to Benito Remarque’s sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front, Mussolini as “the mad dog of Europe.” Rosen kept at Gyssling had pressured Universal but also had warned it. Again announcing production plans, he said the individual actors and technicians that if the film of- picture would be accompanied by a novel of the same fended the Germans, Germany would not only ban name. In July 1935, Joseph Goebbels and the German that picture but might ban their past, present, and Film Board of Censors notified MGM’s foreign department that “photoplays written by Herman J. Al Rosen approached the U.S. State Mankiewicz” would not be allowed Department about the movie and into Germany unless Mankiewicz’s name was removed. There was no came close to convincing Sol Lesser to accompanying explanation. Mankiewicz had spent the produce it at RKO. previous two years turning out MGM fluff, and, if anything, his 1934 Stamboul Quest, a future films. Universal capitulated, transforming Re- caper starring Myrna Loy, was a sympathetic portrayal marque’s anti-Nazi film into a comedy. of an actual World War I German spy. His most recent That attempt failed as well, and by then events picture was Escapade, an adaptation of Walter Reisch’s were overtaking the screenplay. A January 1938 epi- turn-of-the-century Viennese drawing-room romance, sode of Time’s “March of Time” newsreel/documentary Maskerade. A number of censors had objected to the series revealed more about Hitler and the Nazis than line “A woman in that condition should be seen by two the public had hitherto seen, and refugees were trick- men only; her husband and her doctor, and I am both,” ling into the United States. Despite the fact that income but that risqué reference to pregnancy hardly seemed from the countries under fascist rule had already dried sufficient to trigger a Nazi ban from the highest level, up, the major studios continued to reject hard-hitting
Commentary 31 projects, though they released a few that were at least censors were unlikely to allow the recitation of the implicitly anti-Nazi, including The Three Comrades Lord’s Prayer, and he urged Rosen to shoot the riot (1938), which Herman’s brother Joseph L. Mankiewicz scenes so that they were not “too realistically brutal or produced. Around this time, Rosen published Mad Dog gruesome”—they should show no dead bodies, either as a novel, supposedly written by the pseudonymous in those sequences or in the morgue. Then there was “Albert Nesor” (Rosen spelled backward). Breen’s attention to national sensibilities. “It is our In 1939, six long years after Herman Mankiewicz thought that even though the expression ‘the French had first tried to warn the public, Al Rosen continued are a nation of niggers’ may be an authentic quotation to publicly credit Mankiewicz, Lynn Root, and himself [of Hitler’s], its repetition is likely to give offense to the as Mad Dog’s creators, and to milk every name or con- French nation and people, and it might be well for you nection he could conjure. He even tried hiring Hitler’s to consider dropping the expression entirely.” sister-in-law as the film’s adviser. Finally, Breen grudg- It appeared as if production would begin at last ingly approved the script as a “fair” representation of at Denham Film Studios outside London, with distri- “prominent people and citizenry,” though he cautioned bution by Columbia Pictures. But Mad Dog’s moment that such a film was “enormously dangerous from the had passed. Hitler, Beast of Berlin opened in October standpoint of political censorship outside the United 1939, with a press kit suggesting that exhibitors hang States,” so Rosen would likely encounter “serious dif- photos of Hitler, dress a young man as a storm trooper, ficulty” in marketing it overseas. and build a concentration-camp torture box. In 1940 Then Breen engaged in the usual Code negotia- MGM released The Mortal Storm, a Nazi-era love tri- tions, and his objections, given the subject matter, can angle among a Jewish woman (Margaret Sullavan), a only be described as bizarre. Rosen was to remove the Christian Communist (James Stewart), and a Chris- “obvious homosexual” character—“I think you know tian Nazi (Robert Young) that bore some resemblance that any suggestion, or even the slightest inference, of to Mad Dog. Although it had been adapted from a 1938 sex perversion is not acceptable.” Expletives “For God’s Phyllis Bottome novel, Rosen filed suit in 1943, alleg- sake,” “Oh God,” and “God” were to be eliminated. ing plagiarism by the film’s writers, director, producer, Breen also warned that “political censor boards” fre- and studio. quently eliminated “blood suckers” and would likely Second Circuit Court of Appeals judge Learned also delete the image of a swastika fading into the Hand finally decided against Rosen in 1947—two years figure of a crucified Christ. He noted that the British after the Nazis were finally vanquished.q
32 The Anti-Hitler Movie That Was Never Made : December 2019 Susan Sontag, Savant-Idiot The life and times of a literary celebrity By Joseph Epstein
Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
—PAUL VALÉRY
N IDIOT SAVANT, as is well- ism and then turned round to argue that Jews faced known, is a person with serious with the most systematically murderous totalitarian learning disabilities but gifted system of all conspired in their own death, was yet a in a peculiar and extraordinary third savant-idiot. way, often mathematically or The classic American savant-idiot was Susan musically. A savant-idiot, as is Sontag. This is the Susan Sontag who called white civi- not well- known, since I have lization “the cancer of human history.” She it was who, only just now coined the phrase, is a person who is after a trip to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, idealized learned,A brainy, even brilliant, but gets everything the North Vietnamese and said, “They genuinely be- important wrong. Simone Weil, who starved herself lieve life is simple . . . full of joy . . . they genuinely love for the good of humankind, was a savant-idiot. So was and admire their leaders.” She claimed that the more Jean-Paul Sartre, never giving up on revolutionary than 3,000 innocent people killed on 9/11 in effect had Communism even in the face of the mass murders of it coming to them, for America, through its imperial- Stalin and Mao. Hannah Arendt, who wrote a signifi- ist policies, had brought this attack on itself. Sontag cant book on the crushing oppression of totalitarian- waited until 1982 to decide that Communism was little more than “fascism with a human face” (what, one Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of wondered at the time, was the least bit human about Charm: The Elusive Enchantment (Lyons Press). it?). Only a savant could be so idiotic.
Commentary 33 At her death, the New York Times printed no fewer than four photographs with her obituary. Sontag was, no doubt about it, intellectual cheesecake.
A savant is a thinker, someone less specialized “Our mother never really knew how to be a mother,” than a scholar or scientist; he or she is a generalist, Susan’s three-years-younger sister Judith said. In her an intellectual. The word savant is of course French, journal, Susan wrote: “I was (felt) profoundly ne- and while there have been and are English, German, glected, ignored, unperceived as a child.” Her mother Italian, and American savants, the French have long treated her not with cruelty but with indifference, bred the savant, or intellectual, in its purest type. which from a parent may be the greatest cruelty of all. “To tell about him,” wrote the 19th-century Russian This same indifference, in Benjamin Moser’s novelist Nikolai Leskov of one of his characters, “one reading, left Susan Sontag perpetually off-key in her should be French, because only the people of that behavior, in her understanding of others, in her exag- nation manage to explain to others things that they gerated self-regard. His account of her life, though on don’t understand themselves.” In her literary and the whole admiring, is in good part a chronicle of her philosophical enthusiasms, Susan Sontag aspired to misperceptions, outlandish behavior, broken relation- French intellectuality in all its abstract loftiness, and, ships, including with her son and only child. fair to say, she often achieved it. Of her marriage to Philip Rieff, she claimed that Sontag’s life, now documented by two biogra- “not only was I Dorothea [from George Eliot’s Mid- phies, various memoirs, and the publication of large dlemarch] but that I had married Mr. Causabon.” A portions of her own journals, provides the best exam- comic touch in connection with their divorce is that ple of how a savant-idiot is formed. Born Susan Rosen- Rieff and Sontag apparently came to blows over who blatt in 1933, Sontag never really knew her father, who would get to keep the couple’s collection of back is- traveled extensively in China for his fur business and sues of Partisan Review. died when she was five years old. She took up the more In compensation for her mother’s indifference, rhythmic, trochaic name of Susan Sontag from Nathan Susan Sontag did her best to arrange her life so that the Sontag, her mother’s second husband. world would never be indifferent to her. Her weapons The young Susan Sontag lived with a mother in this endeavor were her wide and international read- who largely turned her upbringing over to nannies. ing; her keen sense of the zeitgeist, or spirit of the time; Starved for affection, she retreated into books. In high and her highly photogenic good looks. school, already a subscriber to Partisan Review, she As for those good looks—tall, dark, with lush read a copy of Kant behind the Reader’s Digest the long hair and pleasing strong features, every young class was assigned to read. At 16, she attended the man’s fantasy notion of a bohemian lover—it is not University of California at Berkeley, where she ex- easy to calibrate to what extent they figured in Sontag’s plored the gay underground of San Francisco and had fame. Her writing alone, which was often abstruse, her first lesbian experiences. The following year she without distinctive style, often reading as if a transla- went off to the University of Chicago. There the critic tion from the French (“The thinness of my writing,” Kenneth Burke claimed “she was the best student I she noted in her journal. “It’s meager, sentence by ever had” and called a paper she had written for him sentence—too architectural, discursive.”) is unlikely to “stunning.” At Chicago, after little more than a week- have received the attention it did had it been written long romance, she accepted the marriage proposal of by a plain young woman named Susan Rosenblatt. At a 12-years-older instructor named Philip Rieff. A son, her death, the New York Times printed no fewer than David, was born two years later. four photographs with her obituary. Sontag was, no Benjamin Moser, Sontag’s most recent and au- doubt about it, intellectual cheesecake. thorized biographer, holds that Sontag’s relationship She was also, as Benjamin Moser writes, “Ameri- with her mother early settled her character and hence ca’s last great literary star, a flashback to a time when her fate. Her mother, said to be quite beautiful on the writers could be, more than simply respected or well-re- model of the actress Joan Crawford, was an alcoholic, garded, famous.” How her fame came about is perhaps neither mean nor boisterous, but one who retreated to of greater interest than anything Sontag wrote over a her bedroom, there to achieve quiet oblivion by drink. career of nearly 50 years. As F.R. Leavis said of the Sit-
34 Susan Sontag, Savant-Idiot : December 2019 Her relations with male lovers were for the most part casual, transitory. Those with women, of longer duration, left her confused and often heartbroken. wells in England, Susan Sontag, one often feels, belongs victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘moral- less to the history of literature than to that of publicity. ity,’ of irony over tragedy.” She offered a mild disclaimer about her own position: “I am strongly drawn to Camp, ER CELEBRITY began in 1964 with an essay and almost as strongly offended by it.” But it was as the called “Notes on ‘Camp.’” The essay was a Queen of Camp, its champion and explicator, that she H study of sensibility, homosexual sensibil- initially achieved prominence. ity chiefly, one that was “wholly aesthetic.” Camp was Benjamin Moser quotes Hilton Kramer against about “the spirit of extravagance,” about “a serious- the essay. In vaunting the aesthetic over the moral, ness that fails.” Positing a comic vision of the world, Kramer wrote, Sontag made “the very idea of moral “the whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious.” discrimination seem stale and distinctly un-chic.” What is most interesting about the essay is Sontag’s Inside Partisan Review itself, there was opposi- far-flung connections and examples of camp, perhaps tion to publishing “Notes on ‘Camp.’” It came from the best of which come from the movies. Camp movie Philip Rahv, one of the magazine’s two co-editors, actors in her reading included “the corny flamboyant who thought Susan Sontag bad news generally and femaleness of Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida, Jane loathed this essay in particular. Sontag, apparently, Russell, Virginia Mayo; the exaggerated he-manness of was undaunted. She ended her other famous essay of Steve Reeves, Victor Mature. The great stylists of tem- the time, “Against Interpretation,” by writing: “In place perament and mannerism, like Bette Davis, Barbara of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Edwige Feuillere.” Oth- Which brings one to the erotics of Susan Sontag. er examples in the essay are less telling. What is campy She was, technically, bisexual, but, like most bisexuals, about “much of Mozart,” for one, or “the qualities of favored her homosexual side. In instinct and inclina- excruciation in Henry James,” for another, beats me. tion, she was lesbian, though she preferred not to have “Notes on ‘Camp’” was published in Partisan this public knowledge. Until nearly the end of her life, Review, a magazine that never had more than 5,000 for example, her sister did not know Susan was les- readers. But in that day the editors of the mass-market bian. Her relations with male lovers were for the most magazines scoured it and other little magazines for part casual, transitory. Those with women, of longer news of the next great thing, and “Notes on ‘Camp,’” duration, left her confused and often heartbroken. announcing a new sensibility, qualified beautifully. Jasper Johns, Joseph Brodsky, Warren Beatty, The essay was quickly taken up by Time and discussed and her publisher Roger Straus were among Sontag’s in the New York Times Magazine. Thought among the male liaisons. One of Moser’s more interesting revela- hippest of the hip and dazzlingly attractive into the tions is the extent to which Roger Straus in effect sup- bargain, its author became grist for Vogue, dined with ported Sontag, paying most of her bills and later in her Jacqueline Kennedy and Leonard Bernstein, became career proffering an $800,000 advance on four books, a celebrity herself. She would later be on the cover even though her books did not sell well. She slept, ap- of Vanity Fair; play in Woody Allen’s movie Zelig; be parently once, with Robert Kennedy, and also, in the photographed by Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Rich- Kennedy circle, with Richard Goodwin, to whom she ard Avedon, her lover Annie Leibovitz, and others; and paid what I consider perhaps the greatest mixed com- appear in an Absolut Vodka ad. pliment I have ever come across: “The ugliest person Sontag also became the enemy of those who held I’ve ever slept with was the best in bed.” high culture to be sacrosanct. “One cheats oneself, as Benjamin Moser, himself gay, takes Sontag to a human being,” Sontag writes in “Notes on ‘Camp,’” task for not coming out and announcing her own ho- “if one has respect only for the style of high culture, mosexuality during the AIDS epidemic. It would, he whatever else one may do or feel on the sly.” Sontag was claims, have had a great effect in helping reduce the proposing more than merely an interest in popular stigma then associated with homosexuality generally. culture. Her essay was in fact an attack on the impor- “Silence=Death” was a motto of the anti-AIDS cam- tance of content in art. Camp, for her, “incarnates a paign of that day. Sontag held back. She didn’t want to
Commentary 35 Susan Sontag was very much an establishment figure— established, that is, among the radical left and among what remained of the avant-garde. be reduced to being a lesbian, or even merely a woman, the various screens and masks the world tends to place writer. Her ambitions were grander than that. before it and the metaphors used to describe it. (“Meta- phors mislead,” she wrote in her essay “On Style.”) Yet NE CAN TELL a good deal about a person, she was oddly miscast for the task. The photographer and especially about a writer, by his or her Lisette Model wrote of On Photography that “this is a O admirations. In Sontag’s case, two prominent book by a woman who knows everything and under- savant-idiots were among them. She much admired stands nothing.” Many of her friends and others who Arendt—“the kind of writer she wanted to be,” Moser knew her attested to Susan Sontag’s inability to put writes, “a woman but a writer first of all”—and took herself in the place of others. “She was not smart or her as a model writer. She also greatly esteemed Sar- intuitive emotionally,” a friend named Don Levine told tre. “I realize how important Sartre has been to me,” Moser. Joan Acocella, interviewing her late in life for Sontag wrote in her journal. “He is the model—that a New Yorker profile, was astonished at how extraordi- abundance, that lucidity, that knowingness. . .” Walter narily unaware of herself she was. After spending time Benjamin, Moser reports, occupied “pride of place” in Sarajevo during the Bosnian crisis, she began to in her personal pantheon. Her admiration for Paul think of herself as Joan of Arc, a self-image that did not Goodman, a 1960s guru, was unbounded: “He was our get in the way of her ordering vast quantities of caviar Sartre and our Cocteau.” She praised the avant-garde on her friend Larry McMurtry’s tab. composer John Cage. She saw herself in the intellec- None of these qualities, or rather absence of tual line of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and qualities, made for the accomplished novelist Susan the Romanian aphorist E.M. Cioran. She esteemed Sontag hoped to become. As Moser notes, “she rec- Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, and Roland Barthes. ognized her own inability to write narrative fiction.” Not a lot of laughs here. Herbert Marcuse, who for a period lived with Sontag Unlike many of these figures, Susan Sontag was and Philip Rieff, said that “she could make a theory out herself very much an establishment figure—estab- of a potato peel,” but, without a feeling for experience lished, that is, among the radical left and among what and understanding of other people, she never wrote remained of the avant-garde. A regular contributor to fiction with characters who came alive. As a young the New York Review of Books, she was a figure of the woman, she much admired the arid, idea-driven fic- 1960s, a member of high standing of elite leftism. Her tions of Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet (an Against Interpretation appeared in 1967 and was, ac- admiration she later disavowed). Moser, who wishes cording to Camille Paglia, “among a dozen books that to put the best face on Sontag’s fiction, calls her nov- defined the cultural moment and seemed to herald els “brave, noble failures—unforgettable.” Brave and a dawning age of revolutionary achievement, by stu- noble, I am not prepared to say, but I can personally dents of the Sixties as well as Sontag herself.” attest that they are eminently forgettable. “Maybe art Sontag may have been radical, she may have has to be boring, now,” she wrote, and hers—including been wildly detached from reality, but she was never her fiction and two films shot in Sweden—all driven unfashionable. However outré her opinions, however solely by ideas, too often was. abstruse her writing, the world had nonetheless de- cided to shower its attentions on her. She claimed to HE LAST SENTENCE of Moser’s Susan Son- have no interest in fame, yet, Jasper Johns reported, tag reads: “And she warned against the mysti- “she very early on believed she would win the Nobel T fications of photographs and portraits: includ- Prize” and at the end of her life fell into depression ing those of biographers.” In his biography, Moser, I when J.M. Coetzee, and not she, won the Nobel Prize believe, came to praise Susan Sontag. Biographer and in Literature in 2003. subject, after all, seem to share the same politics, that Much of Sontag’s nonfiction—her books On Pho- of conventional American leftism. He gives her writ- tography and Illness as Metaphor, her essays, and the ing the benefit of nearly every doubt. In his summing- rest—is an elaborate attempt to grasp reality behind up final pages, he writes that, though her answers to
36 Susan Sontag, Savant-Idiot : December 2019 Her views were standard left-wing ones. She couldn’t seem to imagine figures of greater evil than Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. She early revered Fidel Castro. the questions of the day may not always have been her ignorance in public. right, she, for nearly 50 years, “more than any other Sontag was also ignorant of the basic facts of prominent public thinker, had set the terms of the cul- life. On more than one occasion Moser refers to her tural debate in a way no intellectual had done before poor hygiene: “not brushing her teeth or bathing, not or has done since.” knowing that she was going to get her period or that Yet Sontag did not make it easy, even for an childbirth was painful.” She early went on amphet- admiring biographer. In Moser’s biography, it soon amines, to stay awake and hasten her writing, and suf- enough becomes plain that she was, not to put too fine fered the effects in mood swings, rudeness, loneliness, a point on it, not a nice person. Once fame had arrived, and fear of abandonment. She was one of those people she became a diva, with all the deficiencies of tempera- who needed others to clean up after her, and she found ment inherent in the role but without the great voice them in paid assistants, editors, friends, sycophants. for justification. The record of Sontag’s kindly and She couldn’t stand to be alone yet treated nearly every- generous acts is brief; that of her egotism, selfishness, one near her badly. and cruelty, copious. The most controversial aspect of Moser’s biog- For openers, the Susan Sontag who resented the raphy is his repeated assertion that Sontag, in her late inattention of her mother was herself a less than atten- teens, actually wrote Rieff’s career-making study, a tive mother. She often exclaimed her love for her son book entitled Freud, The Mind of the Moralist. Sontag to various friends. Yet early in the child’s life she aban- herself claimed it was so, and Moser takes it for the doned him to spend a year in Oxford. At age four, she truth. At various places, he writes sentences that begin had him reading Candide, Gulliver’s Travels, Homer; “As she wrote in The Mind of the Moralist…” My own at eleven, she had him reading War and Peace. Ma- guess is that Sontag did what in the trade is known as ria Irene Fornés, a Cuban-American playwright and a heavy edit of her husband’s book. Rieff, true enough, one of her lovers, thought she gave David, in Moser’s was not an easy writer, but he could be a power- words, “a bad combination of too much latitude and fully intelligent one, and his Triumph of the Thera- too little attention, and told her so.” Another lover, Eva peutic (1966) is one of the key books of the past half Kollisch, said, “I think she shortchanged him of a lot of century. No 19-year-old girl, no matter how precocious, love and affection.” She often deposited the boy in the could have written Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. care of others and pretty much left him to raise him- self. The writer Jamaica Kincaid wrote that “she really OW, THEN, could a woman who was so inad- wanted to be a great mother, but it was sort of like equate a mother, so untrustworthy a friend, wanting to be a great actress, or something… I would H so out of touch with the most commonplace say there was [in Susan] no real instinct for caring for realities, have been a penetrating analyst of culture another person unless they were in a book.” and politics? The short answer is that she wasn’t. In Moser’s biography several people attest to In politics, Susan Sontag’s views were standard Sontag’s insensitivity, her tactlessness, her humorless- left-wing ones. She couldn’t seem to imagine figures ness, her self-grandiosity. “It was not that she wanted of greater evil than Ronald Reagan and George W. to hurt people,” said a friend who knew her from Bush. She early revered Fidel Castro. She condemned University of Chicago days. “It was that she was sim- that by now hoary leftist cliché, the consumer soci- ply oblivious.” Eva Kollisch claimed that Sontag “was ety. All this dovetailed nicely into her general anti- one of the most immoral people I ever knew.” Moser Americanism. In 1967, she declared that “living in records that she had no compunction about sleeping the United States hurts so much. It’s like having an with her best friend’s husband. She saw nothing wrong ulcer all the time.” America was for her a “too white, with regularly humiliating Annie Leibovitz, her last death-ridden culture.” All this culminated in her no- and perhaps most faithful lover, a woman Benjamin torious incendiary New Yorker statement that on 9/11 Moser estimates spent more than $8 million on her. America got what it deserved. Sontag corrected Leibovitz’s grammar and pointed out Sontag’s observations on culture, though pitched
Commentary 37 on a higher level, were scarcely more subtle. Consider and was essentially to prove yourself a Philistine. What her youthful reverence for the films of Leni Riefen- eluded her was that style was the way an artist, any art- stahl, The Triumph of the Will and The Olympiad, ist, views the world—that style is, in the end, content. both produced under the Nazis. “The Nazi propaganda Friends claimed that Susan Sontag was blind is there,” she wrote in her essay “On Style.” “But some- to much visual art; others that, though she regularly thing else is there, too, which we reject at our loss… dragged herself to the opera and concerts, she was not these two films of Riefenstahl (unique among works of truly responsive to music. Ideas, and ideas alone, lit Nazi artists) transcend the categories of propaganda her fire. Her own ideas in the political realm unfortu- or even reportage…. Through Riefenstahl’s genius as nately were unoriginal; those in the realm of culture, a film-maker, the ‘content’ has—let us assume even unhelpful. Yet the utter absorption in ideas, which against her intentions—come to play a purely formal permits no contradiction from experience, no rebuff role.” Later, Sontag would, as we now say, walk back from reality, is the hallmark of the savant-idiot, and her views of Riefenstahl, but not her view that a central what made Susan Sontag the American savant-idiot concern with the content of art was to miss its point par excellence.q
38 Susan Sontag, Savant-Idiot : December 2019 Politics & Ideas
The Tragedy of the One-Drop Rule
Self-Portrait in Black and ery-room discovery that he has fa- tancing himself from his daughter White: Unlearning Race thered a tiny human whom most or wife, but rather by deconstruct- By Thomas Chatterton seeing people would view as white. ing the basic idea of race. He Williams Although Williams is biracial—the notes, correctly, that the historical W. W. Norton & Company, son of an erudite Southern black American black experience had 192 pages man and a “blonde-haired, blue- little to do with “strict genetic eyed” mother of Northern Europe- markers”—after all, mulatto by- Reviewed by Wilfred Reilly an origins—he declares that he has blows of slave masters and honey- always viewed himself as black, in blond “palomino” girls were bru- HOMAS Chatterton accordance with the old American talized on Southern plantations Williams’s Self-Portrait idea that “one drop” of African rights alongside new arrivals from in Black and White is blood makes a person a Negro. the Slave and Pepper Coasts. In a book about one man’s Judging from his book-jacket photo, such a context, any part-African decision to “renounce” Williams also seems to be someone person was, practically speaking, T race, as a concept and identity. Wil- who “looks black,” a light-brown politically black. However, today, liams opens his book with the deliv- guy at least as dark-skinned as I am. as ideas of whiteness and what However, having a daughter with a Williams calls “mixed race non- Wilfred Reilly is an associ- white Frenchwoman forces him to blackness” become more flexible, ate professor of political science at challenge this view: Young Marlow it is hard not to notice that many Kentucky State University. He is the is 80 percent or so nonblack and “black” Americans don’t look very author of the book Hate Crime Hoax “impossibly fair-skinned.” African at all—and, for that matter, and the upcoming Taboo: Ten Things To his credit, Williams responds that many dark-haired, black-eyed You Can’t Say. to this situation not by at all dis- whites obviously have more than
Commentary 39 a touch of ancestral Moorish or can and 58.7 percent Northern Eu- Indian blood. In this context, what The ropean. There seems to be no logi- sense do racial labels make, and i cal reason he could not describe what value do they have? author himself as “mixed,” or “mulatto,” None, Williams concludes. By or that his daughter might not the end of book’s first section, points out that call her background “mostly white Williams has stated that he, his various groups but with some black ancestors.” I beloved daughter, and many of his myself have a small but substan- friends are clearly neither black that differ on tial percentage of (Native) Indian nor white; described the entire the matter of blood and try to remain linked to idea of biogenetic race as a “ca- this aspect of my heritage by do- lamitous thought” inspired by the the potentially ing things like shooting the bow. racism of the European Enlight- irrelevant trait Being of multiple races does not, enment; and has openly decided I think, require identifying as a to reject the whole troubled con- of skin color race-less man. struct. Williams encourages others also tend to However, while making his epis- to do the same. He eloquently de- temological way toward the com- scribes racial categories as mean- differ in terms of plete rejection of race, Williams ingless for most people and gives serious variables notes what many might consider to the example of a hypothetical be a better solution to the racial ob- East Indian man, who would have like income, sessions of today. He points out that been classified as a “Hindu” from the modern American conception 1920 to 1940, “other” from 1950 to education, and of race is very highly “classed.” This 1960, and a white from 1970 until behavior. is to say: Different groups that differ recently. Today, quite probably, the on the matter of the potentially ir- same fellow would be reclassified relevant trait of skin color also tend as “Asian.” Why bother with any of to differ in terms of serious vari- this, Williams asks, when such cat- be further subdivided into 150 “an- ables like income, education, and egories cannot adequately capture cestry composition” groups (e.g., behavior. The result of this is that this man, or anyone else? Ashkenazi Jewish). If there exists a great many traits are perceived A good question. As a black any particular reason not to call as racial when they are actually man, a writer on race, and a these subdivisions 1) “races” and social-class or even regional char- quantitative wonk, I have several 2) “ethnicities,” or to behave as acteristics. In one great passage ut- responses to it, and to Williams’s though dividing up a room full of terly familiar to me as a Chicagoan, book (which I liked) more gen- Norwegians, Ghanaians, and Kore- Williams tells the story of an Italian- erally. First, I feel he is frankly ans on the basis purely of physical American family friend who refers wrong that racial categories are characteristics would be especially to Williams’s bookish black dad as meaningless and almost endlessly difficult, I cannot discern it using “whiter” than his own relatives, and plastic. Ironically, the idea that elementary logic. proceeds to defend this position race is entirely a social construct Williams is of course correct coherently for some time. In an- seems to have taken hold outside that the human races can blend, other, a college girlfriend describes the academy during the same peri- and often improve by doing so. her European-immigrant mother od—from the early ’00s on—when But, to me, the people produced from Brooklyn as “not a … white reliable genetic testing became by these blendings are not with- woman”—meaning, in essence, “not popular and widespread. Using out race but rather simply inter- a cheery suburbanite.” contemporary haplotypic data, the racial, and the degree to which In addition to being surpris- genetics website 23andMe divides different groups have contributed ingly funny and touching, these humankind into six large “global to their backgrounds can be mea- anecdotes help illuminate a way populations”—European, West sured quite specifically. At one forward. As several social scientists Asian and North African, Central point in Self-Portrait, for example, have pointed out, race is a source and South Asian, East Asian and Williams does take a DNA test and of surprisingly little animus when Native American, Sub-Saharan Af- finds himself to be exactly 39.9 it comes to groups who vary only rican, and Melanesian. These can percent Sub-Saharan Black Afri- in terms of this one characteristic.
40 Politics & Ideas : December 2019 Asian Americans, for example, per- with any amount of black ancestry continue to identify as African form (at least) on par with whites is black and that all share at least Americans facing contemporary in terms of “classed” characteris- some current experience of oppres- oppression because of the one-drop tics such as personal income and sion. Williams himself appears to rule. Obviously, convincing people scholastic test scores. They also have believed this prior to the birth either that race does not exist or frankly seem to be one of the most of his baby girl, and he describes that it does but matters little will successfully “assimilated” groups his father continuing to refer to his require first disabusing them of the in the country: reporting rela- blond granddaughter as simply a idea that being any percentage Af- tively little racial tension, marrying light-skinned “palomino.” rican is one of the most important members of other races 29 to 33 More important, Williams, com- things in the world. percent of the time, and posting by ing close to taboo territory, points Whether more people do in far the lowest violent-crime rate of out that many modern black cul- fact come to accept either thesis all major groups. tural figures—Jesse Williams, Colin remains to be seen. In the mean- Given this data, it seems undis- Kaepernick, even Barack Obama— time, read Thomas Chatterton Wil- putable that a good way to reduce are obviously at least 50 percent liams’s engaging account of himself the salience of race would be for Caucasian and were raised largely as a “black” man with a “white” Americans to work together to 1) by Caucasian family members but daughter.q build a shared national identity and 2) honestly identify and then eliminate those negative nonracial characteristics associated with each racial group: disproportionately high crime rates and a simmering sense of being “oppressed” among Godsforsaken blacks, more than a little residual racism among whites, a lack of Return of the Strong Gods: “anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, and English competency among many Nationalism, Populism, and the anti-nationalist” narratives. These Latinos and immigrants, and so Future of the West narratives have committed us to forth. Obviously, no sane person By R.R. Reno worshipping “weak gods”—open- wants all Americans of every eth- Gateway Editions, 207 pages ness, diversity, multiculturalism— nic background to abandon their to protect us from the strong gods cultural characteristics and become Reviewed by Richard M. of nation and religion that might upper-middle-class Anglo-Saxons— Reinsch turn back the clock to 1939 or 1914. imagine the terrible food, if nothing The postwar consensus once else. But a society in which whites N HIS NEW book, R.R. Reno made sense, Reno says, but in our and blacks vary chiefly in terms of seeks to reacquaint us with day its imperatives have become skin color itself, rather than, say, the moral and political sig- “flesh-eating dogmas” that deprive “perception of the government as nificance of what the sociol- us of solidarity. Reno sensibly ob- run by genocidal racists,” would be ogist Emile Durkheim called serves: “It is not 1939. Our societ- a society far freer of racial conflict. I the “strong gods,” which Reno de- ies are not … marching in lockstep. But Williams’s book also identi- scribes as “love of the divine, love of Central planners do not clog our fies what may well be the primary truth, love of country, love of fami- economies. There is no longer an barrier to manifesting that society: ly.” He wants to wean Westerners overbearing bourgeois culture bent the extraordinary prevalence of from the 20th century’s “postwar on ‘exclusion.’” It is time for the weak the “one-drop rule” of racial iden- consensus” that still unites us “cul- gods, spawned by a 20th century tification dreamed up by Southern turally, even spiritually” around that seems to be refusing to end, to slaveholders among American mi- be ushered off the stage. It is time for norities, especially those on the Richard M. Reinsch is editor the “return of the strong gods.” political left. Throughout Self-Por- of Law & Liberty, and the co-author, The acids of free trade, identity trait, Williams repeatedly discuss- with Peter A. Lawler, of A Constitu- politics, multiculturalism, mass es the fact that African Americans tion in Full: Recovering the Unwrit- migration, gender fluidity, drug of all ages and social positions ten Foundation of American Liberty overdoses, and abortion are dis- often simply assume that anyone (Kansas Press, 2019). solving our societies, Reno claims.
Commentary 41 The postwar consensus in many ment? Reno says that Durkheim’s intellectual motifs support Reno’s ways caused or reinforced these analysis “is not discordant with the thesis. The militancy of transgen- baleful trends and is incapable of biblical view,” because in the “Judeo- der ideology, woke capitalism, and confronting them. The enforce- Christian tradition, governing pow- transnational progressivism on the ment arm of the consensus views ers are not deities, but their dictates liberal left is striking. The rise of the rise of populist politics through are tinctured with divine legitima- certain secular trends such as the exclusively anti-fascist, anti-racist cy.” The word “tinctured” is doing a “nones” expressing no institutional lenses and therefore condemns it great deal of work in that sentence; religious belief, inclines us in the without understanding that such it deserves its own chapter just to direction of obeying the weak gods. politics might be the rattle of great explain how that tincture works. Our politics, however, remains bru- confusion and anomie. In this Reno also notes that our love tally competitive. The conservative regard, Reno asserts that “Trump, for the strong gods “is always ec- legal movement, despite the fact Viktor Orbán, and other populist centric. It impels us outside our- that progressives own much of le- challengers are not choirboys or selves, breaking the boundaries of gal pedagogy in America, punches immaculate liberals.” But, Reno me-centered existence. Love seeks beyond its weight. As for the de- says, “their limitations are not to unite with and rest in that which cline of religion, the solution, at nearly as dangerous to the West as is loved. This outflowing of the self least for Christians, is found in the the fanaticism of our leadership makes love the engine of solidarity.” Gospel itself. I am skeptical that class, whose hyper-moralistic sense If this is true, and I believe it is true, the strong gods are of much use on of mission—either us or Hitler!— then we better be right about not that score. prevents us from addressing our only the strong gods we love but the Reno heavily focuses on solidar- economic, demographic, cultural, limitations we place on the ecstatic ity—defined as the historical and and political problems.” An elite nature of that love. living elements that unite a na- class that insists on addressing State power is a volatile weapon, tion—as a “ministry of the strong these evident problems in our poli- never more dangerous than when gods” to us here below. However, tics and culture with more “open- its rulers believe themselves on the there is no mention, even in pass- ness” and politically correct polic- side of the angels. Reno might recall ing, of its twinned accompaniment ing “will shipwreck our nations.” the minimal consensus that shaped in the principle of subsidiarity, ac- Our times demand the recovery our country’s founding that both cording to which power is best and of the strong gods that can “unite facilitated and limited the national most fairly used when it is exer- societies” because they are “the government’s powers, accorded au- cised closest to those who are sub- objects of men’s love and devotion.” thority to the states for particular ject to it. After all, the voices of dis- These gods of “King and country” matters of self-government, and solution Reno is rightly concerned can give us solidarity because “the refrained from establishing a na- with equally dismiss subsidiarity. ‘we’ is their gift” to us. Strong gods tional religion while leaving state Their universal humanitarian and unite us, but as Reno also states, governments largely free to legislate egalitarian goals demand the dis- they can destroy us. Short shrift, on matters of morality and religion mantling and reworking of local though, is given to the latter con- (a freedom the 14th Amendment and national boundaries, to say cern by Reno because, he says, later narrowed). Our political de- nothing of our bodies and their we have been thoroughly indoc- bates are still oriented broadly by borders. But healthy national or- trinated with ideologies of disen- the contours of this consensus, with ders acknowledge the moral forma- chantment that now automatically conservatives wanting to breathe tion of their citizens in families and lead us away from love of country, new life into it. Should the “strong communities and other local and family, and religion. gods” replace it and anchor a post- associational entities. constitutional America rooted in Likewise, there is no discussion HY DOES Reno, a Cath- the “we” of solidarity? It’s a question in the book of the proper ground, olic and the editor of the the author does not address. nature, or use of political freedom. W predominantly Chris- Have Americans truly pulled At one point, Reno indicts free tian journal First Things, discourse away from national loyalty, re- markets as anarchistic because so heavily on the strong gods? ligion, and marriage under the markets have no higher purpose. Doesn’t he want the primary stress guise of Reno’s postwar consensus Here’s a purpose: Americans go to to be on the God, and how that God theory? The evidence is mixed. To work every day to provide for their both limits and legitimizes govern- be sure, many of our dominant families and loved ones. Their
42 Politics & Ideas : December 2019 consumer purchases in large part predecessor at First Things, the been a fair institutional contest. are for the people they care about late Father Richard Neuhaus, of- Rather than displacing much of and love. This is a crucial piece fered metaphysical and natural law that heritage, a most un-conserva- of self-government in the life of teachings in virtually every number tive move, and substituting Reno’s a free and responsible American, he edited, while assembling a group “strong gods” for it, we should de- as much as it’s also about markets of ecumenical and interdisciplinary velop William F. Buckley Jr.’s state- and the good things they make scholars who resolutely defended ment of conservative belief in Up possible. Part of civil order and on metaphysical and moral terms from Liberalism (1959): “freedom, the common good is liberty, self- the American founding, markets, individuality, the sense of commu- governance, and local rule. While and constitutional law. In the pro- nity, the sanctity of the family, the a purely autonomist liberty is cess, Neuhaus shaped the minds of supremacy of conscience, the spiri- dangerous to good order, author- countless conservatives. tual view of life,” with each element ity without due regard for self- American conservatism has held “in proportion as political government must also be avoided. struggled to stem the tide of the power is decentralized.” No strong According to Reno, one thing is weak gods. It also hasn’t exactly gods or weak gods are necessary.q sure: Postwar conservatism will be of little assistance in re-adorning the stripped altars of the strong gods. Its quarrel with the postwar left “has been a sibling rivalry.” While the left, in its commitment to They Don’t openness, focused on the autonomy of the individual, the right focused on market deregulation and eco- Wanna Work nomic freedom. He argues that both left and right in the West agree on a technocratic, economistic politics, Opting Back In: readers were either comforted or and are equally against “metaphysi- What Really Happens When horrified by Belkin’s report: cal temptations” and have “encour- Mothers Go Back to Work aged a discourse of critique that By Pamela Stone and Wander into any Starbucks in unmasks” claims of truth. Meg Lovejoy any Starbucks kind of neighbor- Reno is right about aspects University of California Press, hood in the hours after the com- of libertarianism and progressive 239 pages muters are gone. See all those ideology, but he is wrong about mothers drinking coffee and American conservatism as a whole. Reviewed by watching over toddlers at play? Ironically, he quotes from Richard Naomi Schaefer Riley If you look past the Lycra gym Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences clothes and the Internet-access (1948), a book that defined the in- T’S been more than 15 years cellphones, the scene could be tellectual horizon for many postwar since New York Times maga- the ’50s, but for the fact that the conservatives in America. Weaver’s zine writer Lisa Belkin made coffee is more expensive and very metaphysical book argues that a splash with her article the mothers have M.B.A.’s. philosophic nominalism has be- called “The Opt-Out Revolu- come our curse and points to a I tion,” about educated mothers Belkin’s suggestion that Ameri- return to serious classical philo- dropping out of high-powered po- ca’s wealthiest and most educated sophical study in order to heal sitions to stay at home and raise couples are also the ones with the the West. Other examples of post- their children. Depending on their most old-fashioned domestic ar- war conservatives who wrote in a place on the political spectrum, rangements has been confirmed in metaphysical and natural-law key, numerous ways. The well-to-do are even more influential than Weaver, Naomi Schaefer Riley’s es- the most likely to get married, the easily come to mind: Russell Kirk, say, “Feminism Is in Trouble,” was least likely to divorce, and the most Willmoore Kendall, Whittaker the cover story of our September likely to find men earning more Chambers, Harry Jaffa, Leo Strauss, issue. She is a resident fellow at the than women. The idea that wom- Eric Voegelin, among others. Reno’s American Enterprise Institute. en’s M.B.A.s turned out to be of no
Commentary 43 more use than the MRS degrees managing the home front on a that their mothers and grandmoth- Much full-time basis. Once this division ers received was more than many i of labor is established, it becomes people could bear. of the harder for the mother to go back to A recent study found that about work. The authors note that “these 20 percent of college mothers with volunteering women experienced a surprising children under 18 have opted out or that women drift to what we identify as ‘privi- are at home full-time. Around 30 or leged domesticity.’ Over time, their 40 percent of mothers with degrees do outside of new lives as at-home mothers cre- from elite schools have at some their homes is ated a heightened involvement in point taken a sustained break from mothering, community volunteer work. Among Harvard Business an extension of work, and traditional household School alumnae, 30 percent had at their intensive roles.” Stone and Lovejoy note that some point been at home full-time. much of the volunteering these But the time in which we have mothering. women do outside of their homes children at home is actually only They volunteer is really an extension of their inten- a fraction of our working lives. So sive mothering. They volunteer at Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy— at school—and school a lot—and then, when their scholars at the City University of when their kids kids graduate, they generally stop. New York and Harvard respectively, But for some women, these whose work formed the basis for the graduate, they volunteer positions turn into full- original Belkin article—set out to generally stop. time work. Many choose to work learn what became of these Lulule- for educational institutions or lo- mon-clad former management con- cal nonprofits that offer flexibility sultants after their kids got older. even if the paycheck is significantly at school. They tell it when you’re lower than what they were making HE FIRST thing they found driving them to piano lessons, and before they opted out. was that the opt-out revo- from the back of the car comes this When they opt back in, they do T lutionaries stayed home little voice …. In some ways, I think not want to return to their former longer than they had originally it’s easier for them to talk to the employers. A national study found planned. Before having kids, many back of your head.” that only 5 percent of women women imagine that they will take Thus it is that many upper- sought to be rehired. Perhaps, as time off from work when the kids middle-class women stay out of Stone and Lovejoy argue, it is be- are little. They want to see the first the workforce through the time cause their former employers were steps, hear the first words. And they their kids graduate from high so unyielding as to drive them out want to see their kids before early school. As the authors point out, of the workplace to begin with. Or bedtimes. And, by the way, full-time they are pouring all their ener- perhaps it’s because something child care is pretty expensive. gies into ensuring that their kids about being at home with kids has What these moms discovered, maintain the same class status they changed their orientation. Romano though, is that older kids also enjoy. Sometimes these moms may tells them, “I felt like Sybil; you benefit from having their parents overestimate how important their know I’m like trying to twist my around more. And parents often time with their children is. As one head around to go from being, find their older kids enjoyable. explained: “My sitter can’t sit down ‘I’ll scratch your eyes out over an Take Meg Romano, who “reluc- with my 9-year-old and do a math eighth of a point’ to, you know, nur- tantly” quit her job as a financial assignment. So if I weren’t home turing good mommy.” trader after the birth of her third in the afternoon to assist, I don’t Many of them instead decide to child and then planned to return think it would get done.” Really? retool and launch themselves into to the workforce relatively quickly. It is undoubtedly true, though, professions that are entirely new She changed her mind. Children, that for these women whose hus- or only tangentially related to what she told Lovejoy and Stone, “don’t bands work long hours and have they did before. They go to work come to you and say, ‘Mom, I re- jobs that demand constant and for nonprofits, schools, or philan- ally need to talk to you about some- immediate attention, things go thropies. Some have to go back to thing important that happened more smoothly with one parent school but others are able to spin
44 Politics & Ideas : December 2019 volunteer work into connections ity and the status maintenance own families over what the au- to new fields. Still more decide imperative of their upper- thors see as the best avenues for to consult part time in their pre- middle-class form of intensive the advancement of their gender, vious fields. Generally speaking, mothering and community in- Stone and Lovejoy are forced to they have little trouble relaunching volvement; and 2) eroding their offer new solutions. They sug- their careers. A booming economy incentive to return to elite gest that corporations do more with low rates of unemployment careers while giving them the to limit work hours. Since they probably helps. freedom to pursue work that is won’t do that on their own, they And here’s the kicker. The wom- less lucrative but more mean- suggest that the government “re- en actually like these new jobs ingful to them. quire … them to pay overtime to better. As the authors write: “While professionals and managers.” objectively, especially with regard And don’t be fooled, the authors They also recommend that we to pay, security and benefits, their warn, by the fact that these women pay the same rates to male- and new jobs compared invidiously to say they made these decisions female- dominated professions: their former ones, women were freely: “Their affluence, their un- “The artificial, systemic, and dis- much more satisfied with work derstanding of the privilege of their criminatory devaluation [of care- the second time around.” When position, their professed perfec- giving professions] obscures the the authors first interviewed them tionism, and their strong sense of fact that the care work involved about their careers, “women most personal agency led them to adopt in traditionally female-dominated often indicated mixed feelings or the narrative of choice.” The au- occupations is intrinsically valu- moderate satisfaction, and fully thors also seem startled that these able … and meaningful.” two-thirds reported either low or women continue to call themselves Finally, the authors recommend moderate levels of satisfaction. “feminists” even after they have that men should do more co- Rating their current jobs, however, damaged the cause. parenting. There is little acknowl- women are highly satisfied, two- These opt-outers may actually edgement that this is already hap- thirds giving them the thumbs up.” be to blame for the dearth of pening. The authors argue that Which is great news. Right? women in corporate leadership more mandatory paternity leave Stone and Lovejoy have finally positions, working as partners at will help solve this problem. found the answer to the age-old high-powered law firms, or work- But if women are happy with question of what women want. ing at the highest levels of politics. the current arrangement, why will Oh, not so fast, the authors claim. “The very women who are best having men stay home for a few These women may have found positioned (and indeed expected) more weeks significantly affect some kind of individual happiness. to surmount barriers and close their decisions? Ultimately, the But what about the sisterhood? gender gaps instead pursue career- authors come clean. The goal, of Stone and Lovejoy write: family strategies that work for course, of feminism is not to help them individually, but that ulti- individual women lead fulfilling Once women are out of the mately exacerbate and increase lives. Instead, they write, “we need labor force, their class privilege gender inequality overall,” Stone a significant shift in the social works to further undermine and Lovejoy write. system (and balance of power) in their gender-egalitarian aspira- the United States. Our prevailing tions by 1) keeping them out of ECAUSE these highly edu- form of capitalism (also known as the workforce for a longer time, cated women seem so in- ‘neoliberalism’) and patriarchy as seduced by the patriarchal bar- B tent on pursuing their own we know it have to change.” gain of privileged domestic- happiness and the good of their Good luck with that.q
Commentary 45
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46 or call 1-877-753-0337 Politics & Ideas : December 2019 Culture & Civilization
The Auden Poem Auden Hated
On ‘September 1, etry (as well as the lyrics of popular at any given moment. In keeping songs) so readily quotable is that it with his wish to become, “if pos- 1939’ lodges spontaneously in the memo- sible, / a minor Atlantic Goethe,” he ry because of its orderly rhyme and also wrote about public occasions By Terry Teachout prosody. Whatever the merits of ranging from the Spanish Civil War Robert Frost’s claim that writing to the deaths of Freud and Yeats, RECIOUS little of the free verse is like “playing tennis and did so in a way that was at once English poetry written without a net,” it is far easier to get beautiful and quotably pithy (“You in the 20th century has “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy were silly like us: your gift survived passed into the com- Evening” by heart than, say, Sylvia it all”). All of this helped to make mon stock of universal- Plath’s “Ariel.” Auden, in Edmund Wilson’s strik- P ly recognized literary reference. No It makes sense, then, that after ing turn of phrase, “one of the most doubt this is because so many of its Frost and Philip Larkin, the mod- edible, one of the most satisfactory makers chose to write free verse. ern English-speaking poet who is of contemporary writers in verse.” Part of what makes traditional po- most often quoted should be W.H. His mature poems were, almost Auden, a lifelong believer in the without exception, accessible to the Terry Teachout is Commen- virtues of prosodic regularity. Not common reader. tary’s critic-at-large and the drama only is Auden easier to cite from Never did Auden employ his critic of the Wall Street Journal. memory because of the formal gift of accessibility more effectively Satchmo at the Waldorf, his one- orderliness of his poems, but he fre- than in “September 1, 1939,” the man play about Louis Armstrong, quently wrote verse whose subjects poem he wrote immediately after has been produced off Broadway and were of more obviously universal Nazi Germany started World War throughout America. interest than the state of his psyche II by invading Poland. Published
Commentary 47 in the New Republic that October, reading of the poem after which “September 1, 1939” contains with- A poem it is named, one in which all of in its nine 11-line trimetric stanzas i Auden’s sometimes-obscure refer- more widely quoted phrases than with ences are explained and the poem any of Auden’s other poems. It was itself precisely fixed in time and there that he called the ’30s “a low so knotty a place.** And Sansom is no less dishonest decade,” described the history is a capable of making broader state- stunned members of his genera- ments that are similarly convinc- tion as “lost in a haunted wood, / natural subject ing, one of them being his explana- Children afraid of the night / Who for illuminating tion of how the poem survived its have never been happy or good,” author’s after-the-fact tinkering: and—most memorably—warned book-length Auden “may have attempted to his readers that they “must love discussion, and hack up the poem and destroy one another or die.” it—but readers have saved it from “September 1, 1939” continues Ian Sansom’s dismemberment and death, time to be cited on appropriate occa- September and time again, rediscovering it, sions, most recently after 9/11, reclaiming it.” when it flew around the Internet at 1, 1939: A Given sufficient patience to put the speed of light. But Auden made Biography of up with Sansom’s self-aggrandiz- no secret of disliking it, going so ing rambling, one will come away far as to call it “the most dishonest a Poem would from September 1, 1939 having poem I have ever written” in a 1967 learned a great deal about what he letter and dismissing it as his “least appear to fit the rightly describes as “a poem that favorite” of his own poems in a later bill. still reverberates with meaning interview with the Paris Review. and controversy, a poem that read- He cut the entire eighth stanza (in ers return to at times of personal which the line about the neces- and national crisis.” What he does sity to “love one another” appears) Ian Sansom’s September 1, 1939: A not give us, though, is an unequivo- when he included “September 1, Biography of a Poem would appear cal statement of what the poem 1939” in his 1945 Collected Poems, to fill the bill.* Compact and chatty means, partly because “September and then said that it was “a damned but packed with detail, it seeks (in 1, 1939” is not without its patches lie” to say that “we must love one the author’s words) to “demon- of unclarity, but also, one suspects, another or die” and changed “or” strate how a poem gets produced, because he himself is not fully at to “and.” consumed and incorporated into ease with its meaning. As a result of these varied nega- people’s lives.” This is a worthy tive feelings, the Auden scholar goal, and to a not-inconsiderable UDEN’S understanding of Edward Mendelsohn chose to omit degree Sansom’s study achieves the world around him was “September 1, 1939” from the re- it. Alas, Sansom, a British radio A outstripped at first by the vised edition of Collected Poems he broadcaster and mystery writer, is a uncanny virtuosity with which he edited in 1976, three years after the sickeningly coy stylist, at once self- was able to depict it. T.S. Eliot, who poet’s death. Yet the original ver- important and self-deprecating (“I recognized his phenomenal talent sion continues to be read and quot- was in the slow learners’ class early on and was one of the first ed, even in preference to Auden’s in school and seem to be a slow people to publish Auden’s work own revised version. Indeed, it was learner still”). As a result, his book, in his professional capacity as an included by Mendelsohn in the in which he unconvincingly ex- editor for Faber & Faber, said as shorter volume of the poet’s Select- plains on every other page why he much at the time in a letter to a mu- ed Verse he edited three years later, is unworthy to write about so great tual friend: “I chiefly worry about declaring “September 1, 1939” to be a poem, puts the reader in mind of Auden’s ethical principles and con- “memorable enough to survive all a saying of Golda Meir, “Don’t be so * Harper, 341 pages of Auden’s interference.” humble—you’re not that great.” ** Among other fascinating details, San- A poem with so knotty a history What makes September 1, 1939 som has managed to identify the specific gay bar on Manhattan’s 52nd Street in is a natural subject for illuminat- readable in spite of its flaws is that which the opening lines of “September 1, ing book-length discussion, and much of it is devoted to a close 1939” take place.
48 Culture & Civilization : December 2019 victions, not about his technical old-fashioned English liberalism, ability; or rather, I think that if a Auden Auden and Isherwood emigrated man’s ethical and religious views i to the U.S. in January 1939. Con- and convictions are feeble or lim- had trary to the angry assumptions ited and incapable of development, of many of their former country- then his technical development is a mystical men—including Anthony Powell, restricted.” experience that who referred to Auden thereafter Significantly, Eliot’s letter was as “that shit,” and Evelyn Waugh, written in 1930, the year in which had inspired who parodied the two men as Faber published Auden’s first “of- him to distrust “Parsnip and Pimpernell” in his ficial” volume of poetry and in wartime novel Put Out More Flags which, according to Auden himself, the adequacy of (1942)—they did not flee England he “began to read newspapers.” purely secular in order to escape the trials of war. It was in the same year that the Deeply disturbed by Europe’s in- 23-year-old poet, angered by the solutions to the ability to resist the rise of Fascism ineffectuality of inter-war English world’s trials. and no longer convinced (if they liberalism, started to engage in ever had been) that Communism earnest with politics. Formidably He instead offered a satisfactory alternative, intelligent but emotionally imma- embraced an they had come to the conclusion ture, he was inclined by tempera- that England no longer had any- ment to try on positions in public idiosyncratic but thing affirmative to offer—but that and addicted to issuing excitingly America did. worded but ill-considered ex cathe- genuine brand of Auden thereafter embraced his dra pronouncements on all man- Christianity. new country in all its proliferating ner of subjects. Characteristically, vitality, becoming an American citi- he embraced left-wing politics with zen and settling into a permanent, more excitement than prudence, quasi-marital relationship with declaring himself to be in sympa- hot.” It was, in any case, a stance Chester Kallman, a young Ameri- thy with Marxism and the Com- that Auden would quickly come to can poet whom he met shortly munist Party and spending seven regret, having come to the conclu- after his crossing. But the Atlantic weeks in 1937 traveling throughout sion that poetry, as he wrote two Ocean offered him no surcease Spain in the hope of doing some years later, “makes nothing hap- from the fast-spreading specter of kind of unspecified work in sup- pen,” least of all the kind written to European Fascism, and he looked port of the left-wing Republican serve propagandistic ends. on with horror as the British es- government. On his return, he pub- A mystical experience Auden tablishment continued to turn its lished “Spain,” a pro-Republican underwent in 1933 had already in- face from the realities of life under poem in which he ostentatiously spired him to distrust the adequacy Hitler. “It has taken Hitler to show took the side of “the deliberate of purely secular solutions to the us,” he would write in a 1941 review increase in the chances of death, / world’s trials, and he instead em- of Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature The conscious acceptance of guilt braced an idiosyncratic but none- and Destiny of Man, “that liberal- in the necessary murder.” theless genuine brand of Christian- ism is not self-supporting.” George Orwell, who had spent ity. “You know, it just doesn’t mean Meanwhile, on the first day of more time in Spain and understood anything to me anymore—the Popu- September, he sat “in one of the more clearly what he saw there, lar Front, the party line, the anti-fas- dives / On Fifty-Second Street / excoriated Auden for that pronun- cist struggle. I simply cannot swal- Uncertain and afraid / As the clever ciamento, tartly observing that low another mouthful,” the novelist hopes expire / Of a low dishon- “Mr. Auden’s brand of amoralism is Christopher Isherwood, Auden’s est decade.” Then he went home only possible if you are the kind of friend and sometime collaborator, to write the poem in which he person who is always somewhere said to him in 1939, to which Auden transformed his own uncertainty else when the trigger is pulled. replied, “Neither can I.” and fear into a summa of his gen- So much of left-wing thought is a In the hope of breaking free eration’s feelings about Europe’s kind of playing with fire by people from the rigid grip of left-wing ide- second descent into the collective who don’t even know that fire is ology and the enervating futility of madness of war:
Commentary 49 The enlightenment driven away, a position tenable. Yet it is what time and again. The habit-forming pain, the author of “September 1, 1939,” “May I,” he cries in its last lines, Mismanagement and grief: chastened by the failure of his own “Beleaguered by the same / Nega- We must suffer them all again. ventures into politics and bolstered tion and despair, / Show an affirm- by his embrace of Christian faith, ing flame.” That he succeeded in T IS, one may safely assume, very plainly espouses therein—and doing so in “September 1, 1939” is the grandly resonant generali- it is the reason the poem continues the reason the poem survived all I ties of “September 1, 1939” that to speak to readers who, like Auden his attempts to mute or suppress offended their author’s postwar before them, “cannot swallow an- it, and why successive generations sensibility, in much the same way other mouthful” of the totalitarian of readers continue to turn to it in that Waugh would feel the need ideologies with which the repeat- times of trial. It is, and will always to prune away the “rhetorical and ing cycles of history present them be, an affirming flame of hope.q ornamental language” of the origi- nal version of Brideshead Revisited when he revised the novel in the early ’60s. But Auden was wrong to think that “the whole poem…was in- The Grand Ole fected with an incurable dishon- esty.” Indeed, “September 1, 1939” is powerful above all because of its willingness to tell the unvarnished Melting Pot truth about England and Europe in the ’30s, and it is noteworthy that Sansom’s book retreats into a flurry On Ken Burns’s of evasive obscurity just as Auden Country Music rap artists such as Asher Roth becomes most specific about what (whose mother, to add insult to in- he has to say. For “September 1, By Lauren Weiner jury, is a yoga teacher). 1939” is above all a repudiation of Elvis, if it’s any consolation, the “low dishonest” politics of the OWADAYS every- stole from white people, too. It’s ’30s and an acknowledgment of the body you know true that “That’s Alright,” the 1954 failure of left-wing ideology to pro- could get in trouble hit that began his life of fame and vide an answer to the “psychopath- for some act of “cul- fortune, had been written by the ic god” of Hitlerian nationalism. tural appropriation” black Mississippi Delta blues musi- Instead, as Auden had already N or other: sports teams with colo- cian Arthur Crudup, who had pre- written in The Prolific and the De- nialist logos, people who aren’t Na- viously recorded it to little notice. vourer, a prose work left incomplete tive American getting tribal tattoos, But the material Presley grabbed and unpublished in the summer of servers of bogus banh mi sandwich- next was “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” 1939 and cited only in passing by es on the campus of Oberlin College, by the father of bluegrass music, Sansom, the only way to make the Westerners who practice yoga. The the mandolinist Bill Monroe. Thus world “impossible for Hitlers” is mandarins of political correctness did the Tupelo-born sensation en- to “unite thought and intention patrol the field of music with par- ter show business in a doubly and treat others with love and as ticular zeal. They are fond of say- derivative way: While rhythm-and- equals.” This is what he means when ing—and they’re not wrong—that blues radio stations across the he writes that “Hunger allows no white musicians have popularized, South, Southwest, and middle of choice / To the citizen or the police; and profited from, the work of Afri- the United States were playing Pre- / We must love one another or die.” can-American songwriters and mu- sley’s “That’s All Right,” the country One may take leave to doubt sicians who died in obscurity. They stations flooded the airwaves with that the author of September 1, point to the imitative quality of El- his sexed-up rendition of “Blue 1939, whose own politics, as can vis Presley, Eminem, or the newer Moon of Kentucky.” be gathered from the book, are The story of the “A” side and the standard-issue contemporary Brit- Lauren Weiner is a writer in “B” side of Elvis Presley’s Sun Re- ish left-liberalism, would find such Baltimore. cords debut is told in Country Mu-
50 Culture & Civilization : December 2019 sic, the 16-hour PBS documentary earned the right to choose his own series that aired this fall. Whether What material and exercised it by mak- you love this kind of music or can’t i ing an album, Modern Sounds in stand it, watching even a little of we Country and Western Music. The Ken Burns’s exhaustive and some- know as country rendition it contains of Don Gib- times exhausting program will let son’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” now you in on the fact that no American music comes a classic, won a Grammy for “best musical form would exist without from gospel, R&B release.” its borrowers, blenders, adapters, revivers, and (in some cases) out- blues, and HE documentary is a good right thieves. What we know as Appalachian primer for those unfamiliar country music comes from gospel, T with the basic facts, like blues, and Appalachian music. It music. And it the common musical beginnings, coalesced in the 1930s, along with in Memphis in the 1950s, of a the nascent music industry, and influenced what rock-and-roller and a gospel-loving it influenced what Americans lis- Americans listen country musician. Not only were tened to far beyond the mountains Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash of Appalachia. As the songwriter to far beyond buddies when they were young, so Bobby Braddock puts it: “There the mountains were two Texans, Waylon Jennings was a saying: Blues had a baby, and and Buddy Holly. Viewers are told they called it rock and roll. And I of Appalachia. by Peter Coyote, the go-to narrator always said, yeah, and I think the for the Burns documentaries, that daddy was the hillbilly.” only by happenstance did Jennings At times this creative cross- fail to board the small plane in pollination raised hackles. Some in over the world: because everybody which the rockabilly troubadour the audience at Nashville’s Grand can feel that it comes from one plus Holly and three others died in a Ole Opry, when Elvis took the one equals a hundred.” crash in 1959. stage and performed “Blue Moon The program stresses the black The very term “rockabilly,” of Kentucky,” complained that it influence on country music, high- which was invented in producer was a travesty. On the other hand, lighting Hank Williams’s appren- Sam Phillips’s Sun Records store- songwriter Braddock describes a ticeship with a street musician in front studio in Memphis, helps country tune that he co-wrote rural Alabama named Rufus Payne; convey the hybridized and cross- (“Golden Ring,” a hit for Tammy the harmonica player DeFord Bai- over nature of American music. Wynette and George Jones in 1976) ley’s participation in the Grand Ole “Texas swing” is the country ver- as sounding “like 10 or 12 gospel Opry; and Johnny Cash’s friend- sion of the “big band” sound. Most hymns thrown together.” This was ship in Memphis with a jug-band Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Wil- a quality not many listeners would player named Gus Cannon. liams tunes swing, as do (in a more have picked up on; fans of both the America was racially segregated, “contemporary jazz” way) many sacred and the profane just knew and so was radio. Whenever Ameri- of the arrangements and vocal they liked the duet. cans spun the radio dial or walked phrasings favored by Willie Nelson. Whether it raises hackles or into a record store, though, not Among the vast number of songs not, all this mutual influencing everyone enjoying R&B was black sampled in Burns’s documentary is crosses lines, be they racial, reli- and not everyone enjoying country Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner’s gious, socioeconomic, or political. was white. Episode Four covers the rendition of “The Last Thing on My But we don’t get dreary polemics career of Ray Charles, and speak- Mind,” a folk song by Greenwich on cultural appropriation from the ing about the Georgia-born pianist, Village habitué Tom Paxton. black and biracial musicians who Wynton Marsalis comments: “We “I Will Always Love You,” Whit- offer commentary here. Quite the tend to think of it one way—these ney Houston’s 1992 pop blockbust- opposite. “Music is always striving white musicians heard these black er, was written by Parton in 1974 [toward] the best thing. And the musicians play. Black musicians as her way of telling Wagoner that best thing is a mix,” says Rhiannon were listening to the white musi- she was going solo. The voice of a Giddens. “That’s one of the reasons cians, too.” By 1962, Charles had caucasian hippie, Leon Russell, is why American music has taken been an R&B star for a decade. He heard as Episode Six opens; it is his
Commentary 51 raw yet satisfying piano-pounding Rodney Crowell, and roots-revival Medicine Show, and Jack White rendition of “Will the Circle Be groups including the New Lost City of the White Stripes would be so Unbroken.” Ramblers and the Nitty Gritty Dirt admiring of this music—Giddens As a mini-college of musical Band, forged a more collegiate- even regales us with how much knowledge, the series offers more oriented or folk-rock side of coun- her black grandmother doted on than feel-good moments about how try music that widened its appeal. the cornpone-filled television show music can bring us together. We That side is heavily represented in Hee Haw—is cause for celebration. learn who instituted the electric the documentary, which follows These “influencers” might just be guitar in country-music combos country music up to the year 1996. able to impress upon younger (Ernest Tubb); who brought in the Young performers make their Americans who watch this pro- use of drums (the Louvin Broth- appearance, but only as interview- gram that they need to calm down ers); who was Garrison Keillor’s ees about what happened before a little bit about cultural appropria- prototype radio storyteller (Minnie that point. That hipsters such as tion. To culturally appropriate is Pearl of the Grand Ole Opry); and Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate human, and if done by Hank Wil- what gave the virtuoso bluegrass Drops, Ketch Secor of Old Crow liams, close to divine.q players their (to me) surprising enthusiasm for raiding the oeuvre of Bob Dylan. He went to Nashville to make several of his records. And Dylan’s music was embraced by the legendary banjoist Earl Scruggs, Like, Emily who had grown friendly to the counterculture in the late 1960s upon being persuaded by his sons Dickinson, to oppose U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The history offered here in- clines strongly toward the singer- Whatever songwriterish, as one might expect from public television. Burns and scriptwriter Dayton Duncan anoint A strange, woke TV alum Molly Shannon, which the as the true kings and queens of Washington Post said threatened country those who authored their rendition of a great “to reduce the writer’s life to the own material, or at least some of it. poet’s life punchline of a literary version That would be people such as Rodg- of Rodney Dangerfield.” Now the ers, Williams, Parton, Nelson, Cash, By A.M. Juster perpetrator is Apple TV’s 10 half- and Jennings, along with Loretta hour episodes of its strange new Lynn, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, IS THE season for series, Dickinson. Mel Tillis, and Roger Miller. We digging up and Hailee Steinfeld, an executive also hear about and from clever desecrating Emily producer of Dickinson, plays the Nashville songwriters who did not Dickinson. First lead role of the poet in her mid- have performing careers, such as came last year’s twenties. Steinfeld physically re- Braddock, Harlan Howard, and ’ WildT Nights with Emily, a flimsy sembles Dickinson, but there any Hank Cochran. film starring Saturday Night Live resemblance ends. Dickinson is Also receiving major attention not so much a bloated biopic as a are those who came later but ex- A.M. Juster tweets about poetry fictional reimagining of its subject plicitly tied their work to their pre- @amjuster. His work has appeared as a woke millennial rebel; it is decessors. Dwight Yoakam, Vince in Poetry, the Paris Review, the more in the vein of Abraham Lin- Gill, Emmylou Harris, and Ricky Hudson Review, and many other coln: Vampire Hunter than the ac- Scaggs built careers as respecters of journals. His 10th book of original claimed biopics about Johnny Cash, roots music. They, along with long- and translated poetry, Wonder and Elton John, and Freddy Mercury. hairs such as Kris Kristofferson, Wrath, is due in early 2021 from Given Dickinson’s famous in- Townes Van Zandt, Gram Parsons, Paul Dry Books. junction—“Tell all the truth but tell
52 Culture & Civilization : December 2019 it slant”—perhaps we should accept the help of the writers of the Harold some of Apple TV’s liberties, but When and Kumar films to punch up the minutes into the first episode, it be- i script. comes clear that the show includes Emily Punched up or not, the script far too many heavy-handed devia- started calling makes a catastrophic error by white- tions from the facts. washing religion from Dickinson’s To create a platform for tedious people ‘dude,’ life. Raised a Calvinist in a house- virtue-signaling, creator Alena I wondered hold that regularly prayed together Smith misrepresents Emily’s par- at home, she did reject organized ents as rigid enemies of educa- whether religion: tion for women. Richard B. Sewall, the show’s Dickinson’s preeminent biographer, Some keep the Sabbath going to Church correctly describes Edward Dick- producers had I keep it staying at home. inson as “a strenuous advocate of female education” who sent Emily sought the help Her poems, which often have in- to Amherst Academy, a top-notch of the writers of tense religious feeling and imagery, prep school with many connections are wildly inconsistent when they to their family. He then sent her for the Harold and consider God: a year to Mount Holyoke Female Kumar films to Seminary, the predecessor to Mount Faith—is the Pierless Bridge Holyoke College; few American punch up the Supporting what we see women of the 1850s received a bet- script. Unto the Scene that We do not— ter education than Emily Dickinson. As wooden as the script is, Of Course—I prayed— Toby Huss finds ways to make And did God care? the character of Edward Dickin- Lincoln and other gushy letter writ- He cared as much as on the Air son interesting and intermittently ers of this era as retroactive mem- A Bird—had stamped her foot— sympathetic. Poor Jane Krakowski, bers of the LGBT community. And cried “Give Me”— who plays Edward’s wife, Emily In an apparent attempt to “nor- Norcross Dickinson, has no such malize” the lesbian affair, Dickin- Some attention to this tension luck because the script calls for her son frames the Dickinson-Gilbert in Dickinson’s psyche would have to play a borderline-psycho Happy relationship with a millennial view made her concise and gnomic verse, Housewife; her lines are so leaden of sexuality—everyone under 35 is often written in the meter of hymns, and repetitive that she often looks having casual sex all the time, and more understandable to viewers. embarrassed. Again, this caricature everyone over that age has given up Dickinson never decides whether is more than “slant”—the poet’s on sex. Scenes in Dickinson include it wants to be drama, history, come- mother was herself educated at a young people involved in: semi- dy, or satire. Somewhat surprisingly, boarding school, and her failures public masturbation, large parties it is at its best when it tries to be as a mother tended to derive from where everyone suddenly French- funny. There is an amusing conver- emotional aloofness rather than the kisses somebody else, pre-digital sation about the 1856 Republicans hard-hearted smothering repeat- revenge porn, and under-the-table and the Know Nothings that has edly portrayed in Dickinson. dinner-party orgasms, not to men- a clear subtext for the present day The centerpiece of both the Molly tion opium consumption and danc- without going over the top. Scenes Shannon film and this biopic is an ing with a six-foot hallucinatory involving Emily’s participation in alleged lesbian affair between the insect. a Shakespeare club also provide a poet and her best friend, Susan Gil- The hip-hop score and the oc- platform for several deft shots at the bert, who is in the process of becom- casional surreal cinematography in pretensions of actors. ing her sister-in-law. This part of the the style of Baz Luhrmann only dis- Dickinson takes hard satirical plot relies on controversial recent tract from the plot, but the slangy shots at two famous authors, Louisa scholarship that overreads typically contemporary diction is even more May Alcott and Henry David Tho- effusive correspondence of the 19th distracting. When Emily started reau. The one at Alcott is a miss by a century. A few scholars have made calling people “dude,” I wondered mile. It portrays her at a Dickinson similar efforts to claim Abraham whether the producers had sought family dinner as robotic, graceless,
Commentary 53 and greedy; she then goes for a feisty resistance to young men who weird “run” through the fields with In the courted her in her teens and twen- Emily. My guess is that the writers’ i ties, she later encouraged romantic intention was to mock what millen- case of pursuit by a series of older—and nial academics call “late capitalism” Dickinson, the mostly literary—men. In some of a century and a half too soon, but it her surviving correspondence (her is difficult to tell. blending of the sister Lavinia destroyed most of it Perhaps the highlight of the 10 fictional and after Emily’s death), more tradi- episodes occurs when Emily and a tional aspects of her personality failed suitor go to Walden Pond to the true is so emerge, particularly in letters in try to get Thoreau’s help for their thorough that it which she submissively addresses campaign to stop the cutting of an unknown man as “Master.” a tree for a new railroad line. As may continue to If one encounters viewers of played by John Mulaney, the hypoc- Dickinson fired up to learn more risy of the pampered man of “the confuse students about Emily Dickinson, you can wilderness” is hilarious, and not in who want to be quick to dismiss Apple TV’s the least unfair. Dickinson as a Hollywood fever Sometimes the show is unin- understand a dream. For those in search of the tentionally funny. The relentless great national real Emily Dickinson, tell them the selfishness of its Emily wears on best place to start is Sewall’s well- the viewer. Toward the end of the poet. That is a written and meticulous 1974 work, 10 episodes, the writers decided shame. The Life of Emily Dickinson. to address this problem by having Even more important than minor characters who are people Sewall’s biography are the po- of color improbably remind Emily who want to understand Emily ems themselves, which a series of of the privileges of wealth. The ac- Dickinson: editors butchered in order to do- tors playing these characters, who mesticate Dickinson’s unruly and are quite talented, look almost as Almost nothing to do with often unsettling art. Fortunately, pained in these scenes as those in Emily Dickinson is simple and Cristanne Miller has assembled which Emily’s mother keeps insist- clear-cut....Seemingly with will- Emily Dickinson’s verse as it was ing that housework is the only ap- ful cunning and surely with an originally written in her monu- propriate occupation for a woman. artist’s skill, she avoided direct mental Emily Dickinson’s Poems: answers to the major questions As She Preserved Them (Harvard HE LAST LINE of defense that anyone interested in her as University Press 2016). Anyone se- for biographies this dread- poet or person might be moved rious about understanding Dickin- T ful tends to be that, even if to ask. With success seldom son should not settle for any other they get the details wrong, they stir approached by one destined collection of her work. interest in the main character. In for literary fame, she kept her Dickinson is a pandering dis- the case of Dickinson, though, the private life private. tortion of the life of America’s blending of the fictional and the most important 19th-century poet, true is so thorough that it may con- Any fair look at the evidence we and thus viewers should be care- tinue to confuse students who want do have about Emily Dickinson’s ful to treat it for what it is—an to understand a great national personal life suggests that she had intermittently amusing cartoon poet. That is a shame. the same sort of chronically unre- driven by trendy ideology, and not Richard B. Sewall aptly sum- solved internal conflicts that she a serious appreciation of Emily marized the dilemma of those had in her religious life. For all her Dickinson’s poetry or life.q
54 Culture & Civilization : December 2019 HOLLYWOOD COMMENTARY continued from page 56 in his University of Selecting the correct pronoun to describe a compli- Virginia college yearbook, all the storylines got criss- cated figure like RuPaul is a minefield that has felled crossed and tangled up. On the one hand, blackface many middle-aged white men, and I’m proud that I is irredeemably racist. On the other hand, Ralph have made it safely to the other side. It required a few Northam is a Virginia Democrat. On the third hand, tortured sentence constructions, but I think you have his lieutenant next-in-line has a complicated #metoo to admit it’s was a pretty sweet move on my part. Just problem. On the fourth hand, maybe if we just sit qui- because I am a fat target doesn’t mean I have to make etly and hold very still, this will all blow over. it easy. If I just lie very still and make no sudden move- The fourth hand was the winning hand, and ments, they’ll continue going after their own. Ralph Northam remains the Democrat in charge of And they will. Prediction: At some point in the an even bluer Commonwealth of Virginia. But it was future, somewhere near the intersection of RuPaul’s a close call. Drag Race and Ralph Northam’s blackface, it will oc- RuPaul, the impresario of the cult-hit TV show, cur to someone in the feminist community that drag RuPaul’s Drag Race, would seem to have impeccable is, when you get right down to it, blackface for girls. cultural credentials and an ironclad Get Out of Woke Men dressing up as extreme versions of “the oppressed Jail Free card, but as the intersections of intersection- other,” with elaborate makeup and more than a hint of ality get more complicated and overlapping, even Ru- cruel disdain for their subjects—where, exactly, is the Paul has been tripped up. The use of the word “tranny” distinction that makes one of these performance types to describe transexuals was, a few years ago, perfectly culturally celebrated and television-show-worthy and okay. Now it’s an unacceptable slur, though RuPaul the other a reason to recall a politician from office? was late to realize it. The drag icon was attacked for us- The radical feminists are already gearing up for ing the word—and for defending its use—but that was battle. The specificity of the female sex—i.e., vaginas nothing compared with the controversy that erupted and stuff—is central to the feminist perspective. Trans- when the television host suggested that performers Exclusive Radical Feminists—or “Terfs,” as they style who are undergoing sex reassignment therapy—hor- themselves—are right now sounding the alarms about mones and surgery, essentially—would probably be transwomen (that is, women who used to be men and disqualified from futureDrag Race seasons. who in many cases still have male, um, attributes) “You can identify as a woman and say you’re claiming all sorts of traditionally feminist preroga- transitioning, but it changes once you start changing tives. Unless you were born and raised as a female, the your body,” RuPaul said. “It takes on a different thing; Terfs (reasonably, in my view) assert, you can’t re- it changes the whole concept of what we’re doing.” ally speak to the feminist experience. Gender is a con- That sentence may seem reasonable to some struct, reply the transfolk. A baby with a penis is just a people, or at least the kind of people who understand baby with a penis, it can be a girl baby or a boy baby or all of those newly minted phrases. But it did not seem maybe some new kind of baby we haven’t thought of reasonable to a lot of people in the intersection of yet. Terfs, according to their trans opponents, are just transgender rights, gay rights, queer theory, and gen- privileged white lesbians with tenure. der fluidity, which are words I have randomly placed All of this means that it is inevitable that the into the sentence to seem extremely up-to-date but do intersection of race, sex, trans, and class—the Four not entirely understand. They demanded—and got— Highways of the American Intersectional Left—are an apology from RuPaul, from the person who more about to collide. Maybe that’s why they call it intersec- than anyone has made drag culture and transgendered tionality. People who hang out in intersections often performers mainstream stars, but who apparently still get hit by trucks. has a lot to learn. Notice who is absent from all of these bitter bat- Before we continue, I would like to draw your tles and career-ending wildfires? That’s right—me! I’m attention to the way I have masterfully avoided us- just here writing inoffensive jokes, minding my own ing any gender-based pronoun to describe RuPaul. business. Call me when the shootin’ is over.q
Commentary 55 HOLLYWOOD COMMENTARY What Drag and Blackface Have in Common
ROB LONG ACK BEFORE a person could get in real trouble process, it’s quite possible the episode would have for this kind of thing, I wrote the following joke aired weeks before the Fidel Ramos administration Bfor a comedy series I was producing: signed the relevant legislation, and the Media Action The character that everyone loved to hate, the Network for Asian Americans would have been stand- objectionable, amoral voice of the comic ensemble— ing on wobbly ground. every sitcom has one—is holding forth on the benefits Of course, this was a long time ago, before a sim- of becoming an older and more emotionally mature ple joke could mushroom into a major cultural battle male. “There’s a point,” he says, “when a guy gets leaving careers and reputations in smoking piles along tired of dating and one-night stands and short-term the war ground. In other words, I got away with it. Had relationships and running away from commitment. I written the joke anytime in the past two years, I’d be And when that time comes, when you’re ready for the out and gone, career over. I’d probably be writing these love and the caring and the sharing of a real long-term words during my union-mandated break from my job relationship, you do the mature thing and fly to the at a San Gabriel Valley Quizno’s Subs where I would Philippines and buy yourself a wife.” not be known as the Hate-Speaking Former Television It wasn’t a killer laugh, I admit. But it was a Writer, but rather the Sad Old Guy with the Baggies on fun on-the-way kind of joke, and because it came His Hands Making My Turkey and Cheese. But that’s a out of the mouth of the “bad” character in the series, whopping counterfactual, because I assure you there we didn’t think twice—nor did the network—about is no possible way I would write that joke these days, sending it through the pipes and onto television like, zero chance. Because I know that the Media Action screens nationwide. Network for Asian Americans—and every other similar The Media Action Network for Asian Americans, group—has a much bigger megaphone and a lot more as you might expect from its name, did not take such a power. And I also know that I am a privileged middle- sanguine attitude toward the joke. aged white guy and I have a giant bull’s-eye on my back. After about a page and a half of energetic repri- And, in a way, my acute sensitivity to my privi- mands, the How-dare-you? letter from the executive lege and my status as a Fat Target keeps me safely director of the organization wrapped up with this tucked away, head down over my keyboard, out of specific and stinging slap: “For your information,” range. When you know they’re out hunting for you and he concluded, “the Philippine government outlawed your kind, you tend to keep out of sight. mail-order brides in the early 1990s.” In 2019, it’s when you’re safe—or, when you think For the record, the episode was broadcast in you’re safe—that you get into trouble. When Ralph early 1995. So we were 18 months, at most, too late. Northam was elected Democratic governor of the Had we merely fiddled with the production schedule Commonwealth of Virginia, the prevailing narrative and raced the episode through the post-production among media pundits and news outlets was that this was an indication of the new, blue-state liberal Vir- Rob Long has been the executive producer of six TV ginia. So when a little while later it was revealed that series. he appeared in blackface continued on page 55
56 Culture & Civilization : December 2019 YOU DESERVE TO KNOW THE TRUTH... Two-State Solution Still Possible? While sympathy for Palestinian self-rule is understandable, proponents of the two-state solution must resolve seven tough questions before it can be realistic. The two-state solution—one for Palestinian Arabs, one for 5. When will the Palestinians create a self- Israel, living side by side in peace and security—has long sustaining economy? While the Palestinian Authority been an inviolable principle for both the U.S. and Israel. (PA) and Hamas have received billions of dollars in aid But today, intractable obstacles make two states seem more from the U.S., the European Union and Arab states, a dangerous fantasy than a viable alternative. neither group has invested in infrastructure sufficient What are the facts? to create viable economies. Unemployment in the West Bank is 18%; it’s 52% in Gaza. Without massive Hope of Palestinian independence by the United States international welfare, both entities would collapse. and Israel has since 2000 produced three offers of a Palestinian state in up to 97% of Judea-Samaria (the West 6. What would prevent terrorist Hamas from Hamas clearly Bank), including a capital in Jerusalem. But profound conquering a new Palestinian state? has superior military might: It violently took over Gaza changes in the region—and persistent Arab in 2007, today has 20,000 men under rejection of these offers—make a Palestinian arms and commands tens of thousands state threatening to Israel and the entire Major obstacles of rockets. It also has a well-organized region. Until we can resolve these thorny currently political arm and is supported financially questions, two states can’t yet be considered a by Iran. If a Palestinian state were solution: make the two- formed under the Palestinian Authority, 1. When will Palestinian Arabs recognize state solution how could the U.S., Israel, Jordan and Israel as the national home of the Jewish untenable. Egypt protect the new state from a coup people? For 71 years, the Arabs have by Islamist Hamas terrorists? steadfastly refused to accept the Jewish state—preserving the hope that someday the Jews will be 7. When will the Palestinians institute political driven from the Holy Land. Indeed, according to a recent freedoms and rule of law? Like many Middle East poll, 57% of Palestinians believe their main national goal dictatorships, neither Palestinian “governments” support should be a one-state solution, reclaiming all of historic civil rights or rule of law. The U.N. Special Coordinator Palestine from the river to the sea. Should Westerners has reported that in Palestinian jurisdictions, “condi- insist on something most Palestinians don’t want? tions for rule of law” are non-existent. Human Rights Watch reports that the PA is “arresting, abusing and 2. When will the two warring Palestinian factions— criminally charging journalists who express peaceful Hamas and Fatah—reconcile? Ever since Hamas, the criticism.” Civilian security in both territories is com- Muslim terror group, won Palestinian elections in 2006 and pletely outside of civilian control. then violently seized Gaza, it has waged war with the ruling Fatah party in the West Bank. Not only are Gaza and the At one time, a two-state solution seemed reasonable—before West Bank separated geographically, but for 13 years these the Palestinians turned down generous peace offers by Israel two factions have fought bitterly, despite their peace efforts in 2000, 2001 and 2008, before Hamas seized Gaza and and those of other Arab nations. Until Fatah and Hamas launched three wars against Israel, before Iran blossomed declare peace, Israel has no negotiating partner. into a regional cancer, before the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars, before ISIS and al Qaeda, and before 14 years of 3. When will Hamas retract its sworn mission to corrupt rule by Mahmoud Abbas. Until major problems are destroy Israel? Hamas controls Gaza and is today allied resolved, the two-state solution seems at best indefensible— with Iran—both of which advocate Israel’s destruction and, worse, irresponsible and dangerous. and spend tens of millions of dollars supporting anti- Israel terror attacks. How can Israel achieve security This message has been published and paid for by when the Hamas charter and its every action focus on eliminating the Jewish state by military force? 4. When will the Palestinians hold national elections? Facts and Logic About the Middle East Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was elected to P.O. Box 3460, Berkeley, CA 94703 a four-year term in 2005. He has now served 14 years James Sinkinson, President without standing for election, and neither Palestinians Gerardo Joffe (z"l), Founder in Judea-Samaria nor Gaza have held national elections FLAME is a tax-exempt, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. Its purpose is the research and publication of facts regarding developments in since 2006—they are totalitarian entities. Will creating a the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the new Arab dictatorship help create peace? United States, Israel and other allies in the region. You tax-deductible contributions are welcome. To receive free FLAME updates, visit our website: www.factsandlogic.org Low Fees!
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