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July 24, 2008 08:01 PM

How do you spell “cringe-making”? (Hint: it begins “Obama in Berlin”)

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

The next time you go to Berlin, why don’t you see if Obamania will work for you. Tell the “tens of thousands of elated Europeans” who have mysteriously shown up to hear you that you are addressing them “not as a candidate for president, but as a citizen, a proud citizen of the United [...]

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July 24, 2008 11:08 AM

Multiculturalism in action

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

What is multiculturalism? It is the belief that different cultures have different values and that it is “ethnocentric” to judge another culture by one’s own, necessarily limited, cultural values. Here in the West, we may think that people should be free to marry whomever they like. But that is only our Western custom. Elsewhere, people [...]

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July 23, 2008 01:15 PM

McCarthy to the Rescue, or: How to Deal With Judicial Oligarchy

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

“It’s such strange animal: When attacked, it defends itself.” I first heard this bit of proverbial wisdom at the apartment of Samuel Lipman, the founding publisher of The New Criterion. I don’t remember exactly what the subject of discussion was and I don’t even remember whether it was Sam or one of his guests who [...]

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July 22, 2008 03:41 PM

Kicking the Times: a One-Point Program for GOP Candidates

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

Journalists love giving advice to political candidates. You know the drill: “The Five Things McCain Should Do To Boost The Economy, Bring Peace and Tranquility to the Middle East, and Prevent Balding,” “The Three Things Obama Should Do To Lower Gas Prices, Make Friends With Iran, and Cure Cancer”–that sort of thing. Fortunately, candidates [...]

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July 19, 2008 10:59 AM

Obama, charisma, and the end of politics as we know it

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

Here’s a headline from Fox news about Obama’s upcoming trip to Europe: Obama Trip Could Push Rock-Star Persona to New Heights The story explains: “What you’re about to see is enormous publicity,” Democratic strategist Susan Estrich said. “He’s got three anchors coming with him. He’s got the glitterati of the press corps.” With his visit, the presumptive Democratic nominee [...]

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July 18, 2008 03:37 PM

Obama and the culture of narcissism: A few questions from Charles Krauthammer

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

Noting that “There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics,” Charles Krauthammer has a few questions about Barack Obama: Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, [...]

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July 18, 2008 02:32 PM

Obama’s Quote of the Day

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

Here’s what the presumptive Democratic candidate for President said on July 2, 2008: “We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” Got that? As reported by WorldNetDaily, this [...]

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Jul 17, 2008 04:32 PM

What’s the Matter with New York?

by James Bowman

Barry Blitt’s now-notorious New Yorker cover of Obama as Osama, fist-bumping with Michelle as Angela Davis while an American flag burns in the fireplace, seems to me like those old Jules Feiffer cartoons that you were sure must be very deep, even if they weren’t very funny. Or perhaps they were funny, but only in the very rarefied precincts of the Upper East Side, among the sophisticates who read The New Yorker and delighted in the opportunity to laugh at things the rest of the world didn’t "get." The odd thing about this cartoon, however, is that the audience which alone could find it funny — that is the ever-swelling crowd of Eggheads for Obama who make up both the magazine’s staff and much of its readership — apparently did not find it so. Well, if they don’t think it’s funny, and if the rest of us who pay no attention to and therefore have no anxieties about the lunatic ravings that it seeks to satirize don’t find it funny, who does find it funny?

In other words, it is ironic, but it is ironic to no purpose. Irony is the means by which words or images are given new meanings by new contexts. The same cartoon would have quite a different meaning if it appeared on the cover of some racist or virulently anti-Obama organ. For it to appear on the cover of The New Yorker is merely to say what its critics are now saying: we don’t believe this stuff but we’re terribly afraid that there are lots of people who do. For those of us who don’t share that fear, the attempt to discredit it by dragging a putative right-wing insinuation into the light of day in the hope that everyone will see how ridiculous it is must fall foul of the fact that everybody already knows how ridiculous it is, which makes it not funny to everybody, except for those who are stupid enough to take it seriously, which makes it not funny to them either. What is the purpose of a satire that no one, not even the anxious cartoonist himself, presumably, finds funny?

Behind the outcry among the overwhelmingly pro-Obama media over the cartoon, there lies the What’s-the-Matter-With-Kansas, Thomas Frankish sort of left-wing paranoia which imagines that all those Republican voters out in Kansas and other flyover states are credulous dupes, too dazzled by the fantasies of Machiavellian conservative spin-meisters to know their own interests. Therefore, the cartoon could be seen as a Rove-ish trick designed to make the sort of idiots who voted for President Bush really believe that the Democratic nominee is some kind of terrorist. Yet the Bush-as-stupid trope also originated as a comedian’s gag, a bit of satire that many on the left have come to believe is true. For it is not the ordinary Americans in Kansas but the hyper-intellectual paranoiacs who are the most credulous of Americans, at least those of them — and by the loudness of their voices they seem to be many — who have allowed themselves to be persuaded that the president is either an idiot or a war-criminal or, rather illogically, both.

The most disturbing thing about this media storm is the utter humorlessness not only of the hard left and the media, which we already pretty much knew about, but of the Obama campaign itself, which professed to be mightily offended by the cartoon. And suddenly I am struck by another possibility: that the posture of taking offense was the Obama campaign’s repudiation of the support of the eggheaded, Kerry-loving, cheese-eating faction that so many Americans look on as elitist. At the risk of being seen to have jumped on the paranoiac band-wagon myself, I wonder if giving the offense in the first place was The New Yorker’s way of offering him that opportunity to disclaim the elitist tendency he was so damaged by when Hillary Clinton successfully identified him with it during the primary campaign. Oh those cunning liberals! I hope all you innocent natural conservatives out there are not deceived by their tricks!

****

And speaking of the President’s alleged criminality, today’s editorial in The New York Times on behalf of the "shield law" for journalists now pending in the Senate — the Times is strongly for it, by the way, in case you were wondering — includes the following lines:

The White House, as ever, is playing the fear card, orchestrating a barrage of warnings that the law would "wreak havoc" on national security and "completely eviscerate" the ability to investigate terrorism. Such hype and manipulation is predictable from an administration so obsessed with concealing its own abuses. The Senate must not be cowed. Only through robust reporting has the nation learned the hard lessons of President Bush’s illegal programs to eavesdrop on Americans and run torture prisons abroad.

"Hype and manipulation"? Dear, dear. Where would we be without our noble journalists and editorial writers, ever averse as they are to the slightest suggestion of hype and manipulation, to protect us from these wicked qualities in our elected leaders? Not that there could be anything remotely hype-like about the Times’s reckless accusations of "illegal" behavior — of which this is very far from being the only example — against those leaders or that, if there were, there could be any attempt thereby to manipulate voters by the propagation of such conjectural and irresponsible charges! For thus to characterize the administration’s good faith efforts to protect us from further terrorist attacks would be a powerful argument in favor of the sober earnest of the administration’s allegedly "near hysterical" contention that journalists would use their privileged legal status irresponsibly, to endanger our security.

By the way, I’m being ironical, folks.

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July 17, 2008 11:41 AM

Declinism on the Rise, or how to hate America without really trying

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

Is it “closing times in the gardens of the West,” as Cyril Connolly predicated the middle of the last century? Are we witnessing Der Untergang des Abdenlandes, as Oswald Spengler said even earlier in that most unhappy and bloody of centuries? More to the point, is America, which just yesterday was proclaimed (or berated [...]

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Jul 17, 2008 11:02 AM

Kay Ryan gets her laurels

by David Yezzi

It’s heartening when good things happen to good poets. The announcement today that Kay Ryan will become the next U. S. Poet Laureate almost restores one’s faith in the literary world--in which, so frequently, those lacking taste shower accolades (and cash) on those lacking talent.   

 

[Kay Ryan’s] willfully low-key ingredients are leavened by one of the finest (and funniest) caustic wits in contemporary poetry and by a humane melancholia that lends the poems urgency and grounds them in deep feeling. “Home to Roost” from Ryan’s latest collection, The Niagara River, works its compressed magic on an old cliché:

            The chickens

            are circling and

            blotting out the

            day. The sun is

            bright, but the

            chickens are in

            the way. Yes,

            the sky is dark

            with chickens,

            dense with them.

            They turn and

            then they turn

            again. These

            are the chickens

            you let loose

            one at a time

            and small—

            various breeds.

            Now they have

            come home

            to roost—all

            the same kind

            at the same speed.

At what point does the poem switch – delicately, almost imperceptibly – to a minor key. The comic notes sounded at the outset (flying chickens indeed!), underscored by the internal rhyme day/way and the insistent “yes” meant to tweak our incredulity, produce a smirk. So does the travesty of Eliot’s “Because I do not hope to turn again” and Yeats’s “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” which dashes modernist poetics on the rocks of its own imperious shores. But then comes the shudder of recognition: these birds represent something of great delicacy and variety; great care was taken in letting them loose “one at a time.” Well, here they are again, the poet tells us, returned in lockstep and with an ominous uniformity like a parade of storm troopers. Chekhov is another modern writer who keeps us laughing until the moment we are brought up short by the opposite of laughter. Ryan closes with a show stopper, as “all” reaches up to claw at “small.” The poem sends our own personal chickens – the bitter specters of our best intentions – whirling into the air. 

Occasionally, Ryan’s serendipitous rhymes and tightly turned ruminations approach a kind of light verse, sporting an against-the-grain delight in wit and a rare confidence that humor needn’t cancel the truth in a poem. “Atlas,” for example, tickles the reader while shrewdly identifying a palpable human experience:

            Extreme exertion

            isolates a person

            from help,

            discovered Atlas.

            Once a certain

            shoulder-to-burden

ratio collapses,

there is so little

others can do:

they can’t

lend a hand

with Brazil

and not stand

on Peru.

The argument of the poem remains self-specific, its logic intact, while the experience it describes resonates broadly, becoming universal. Anyone may appreciate the inherent difficulty of coming to another’s aid. Certainly any parent, or teacher, or friend, will appreciate the problem and even feel a twinge of remorse for the many Perus they have trampled while trying to be of help. One might be tempted to see Ryan’s poems as a brand of what Harold Bloom has called “wisdom writing,” if they just weren’t so damned funny — and sad.      

Ryan’s work can be deadly serious as well, as in this passage from her elegy for the Holocaust-haunted writer W. G. Sebald entitled “He Lit a Fire with Icicles”:   

            . . . How           

            cold he had

to get to learn

that ice would

burn. How cold

he had to stay.

When he could

feel his feet

he had to

back away.

The final rhyme lends an affecting sweetness to the poem, which doubles, like Auden’s elegy for Yeats, as an apt bit of literary criticism. Such versatility as Ryan displays occurs rarely. Poets often develop a single mode and stick to it, yet one has the feeling reading Ryan that, while her lyrics proceed in their signature spindle of highly musical speech, she is constantly searching for new ground.

Her poems are at once modest of means and boldly immodest in scope and in their desire to communicate the high-stakes information of the heart. “Ideal Audience” gets at the nature of this desire:

            Not scattered legions,

            not a dozen from

            a single region

            for whom accent

            matters, not a seven-

            member coven,

            not five shirttail

            cousins; just

            one free citizen—

            maybe not alive

            now even—who

            will know with

            exquisite gloom

            that only we two

            ever found this room.

 Ryan’s poems are not written for billboards but for the solitary reader, who against the odds, has come upon her work and been moved by it. That reader, if you are lucky, might even be you.

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