PRIZING ANTI-AMERICANISM If you ran an American foundation with a whole lot of money–so much money that you give out each year what are, after the Nobel prize, the biggest monetary awards for literature in the world–on whom would you bestow your largesse for 2001? Well, as it turns out, the answer is easy, at least for the flush Lannan Foundation of Sante Fe, New Mexico. On Oct. 28, the foundation announced that it was granting a $200,000 “lifetime-achievement” prize to Edward Said, the Columbia University literary critic turned pro-Palestinian activist, and another $350,000 to Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian poet. Said was an early exponent of the race-class-gender school of literary interpretation, famous once upon a time for such things as his denunciation of Jane Austen as a supporter of slavery and for “Orientalism,” his 1978 book raging against Western literature’s presentation of the East. In more recent days, he has been quoted saying silly, anti-American things about the attacks on Sept. 11 and, earlier, photographed in Lebanon throwing rocks across the border at an Israeli guardhouse. (Said insisted the rock was merely a “symbolic gesture of joy,” while Columbia declared Said’s actions were protected by “principles of academic freedom.”) If the name of Mahmoud Darwish is less familiar, you needn’t feel bad. He is a minor Palestinian poet, although he does command some genuine popularity. He is a sort of politicized Rod McKuen for the PLO, best known for his ability to gather good-sized crowds to hear his rhythmic paeans to Palestine and denunciations of Israel. This would all be boringly familiar–if it weren’t for the date. These prizes weren’t given back in the days when it was still fun for the politically correct rich to tweak the noses of the bourgeoisie by toying with anti-Americanism. The Lannan Foundation announced the prizes on October 28, six weeks after the murders at the Pentagon and World Trade Center. “We wanted,” a spokesman explained about Said, “to honor the integrity of his work, the rigor of his scholarship, the elegance of his prose, and his commitment to justice and freedom.” Indeed, the Lannan foundation–whose mission statement declares that globalization “threatens all cultures and ecosystems”–had to go very far out of its way to honor these anti-American authors. Not only is Said the first nonfiction writer to win the award, but the poet Robert Creeley had already been presented with the 2001 prize earlier this month. Since the award began in 1989, only one prize has been given each year. So what makes it so important, all of a sudden, to present a second prize–to a nonfiction writer? Patrick Lannan, speaking for his family’s foundation, insisted that the winners were chosen well before the attacks. “What happened on Sept. 11,” he mourned, “has politicized everything.” Said and Darwish “just happened to be Palestinian and I guess that today that becomes an issue.” But the truth is exactly the reverse: The events of Sept. 11 have de-politicized things. Said and Darwish were chosen for reasons of politics–politics as it was perceived by the intellectual, literary, and prize-giving classes before Sept. 11. What makes the Lannan awards offensive is exactly what now makes those politics offensive. The world has changed for the rest of us; it has been transformed into a more dangerous and far more serious place. Not only is there less patience today for poseurs and would-be firebrands like Edward Said. There is also less patience for wealthy children who want to play with fire. BOOKS IN BRIEF “Communism: A History” by Richard Pipes (Modern Library, 175 pp., $19.95). Richard Pipes calls this little volume both an introduction to communism and its obituary. Marxism-Leninism was first a theory, then a revolutionary program, then the brand name of certain political regimes in the twentieth century. Like earlier manifestations of the age-old quest for perfect equality, it ran its course, and now the whole story can be told. It is our gain that so authoritative a historian as Pipes–a professor at Harvard for the last half century–has accomplished this feat of compression. He is particularly good on the shades of difference among Marxist regimes. Thus, while the Soviet Union demanded outward conformity to the state, Mao’s China pressed for inward conformity, while Ethiopia’s military dictatorship merely “aped Soviet and Chinese practices for its own political ends.” Pipes’s assessment is that of a cold warrior: In the name of great good, communism brought great evil. It failed because it was based on the false idea that man could be remade. If you’ve wondered how your children and grandchildren are going to grasp this large and alien reality, a good move is to make sure they own this book. –Claudia Winkler “Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass” by Theodore Dalrymple (Ivan R. Dee, 256 pp., $27.50). Theodore Dalrymple has written what may be the most depressing book ever: “Life at the Bottom,” a collection of his City Journal essays on the British poor. Dalrymple, a physician in a London hospital and prison, does not possess a soothing bedside manner. In this book, women are hanged out windows by violent boyfriends, assaulted as they lie in hospital beds recovering from earlier assaults, and beaten by brutes. What makes all this possible is the British welfare state, which gives housing and money for nothing, discourages marriage, and affects a studied neutrality on the whole range of “lifestyle choices.” And what makes the welfare state possible–and here Dalrymple is at his most bracing–are the intellectuals who have overturned all the old wisdom about culture, sex, and criminality, creating a Hell that they do not have to live in. His conclusion is straightforward: “The poor reap what the intellectual sows.” But Dalrymple equally condemns the underclass for its refusal to accept common sense. Dalrymple quotes a teenaged girl who has taken up with a known abuser: “I can look after myself,” said the seventeen-year-old. “But men are stronger than women,” I said. “When it comes to violence, they are at an advantage.” “That’s a sexist thing to say,” she replied. A girl who had absorbed nothing at school had nevertheless absorbed the shibboleths of political correctness in general and of feminism in particular. Dalrymple doesn’t advance much in the way of solutions. But “Life at the Bottom” is a valuable–and frightening–reminder of the destruction the welfare system wrought. –Justin Torres BOOK OF THE WEEK Too Funny for Words: A year in the life of P.J. O’Rourke By J. Bottum The CEO of the Sofa by P.J. O’Rourke (Atlantic Monthly Press, 265 pp., $25). There ought to be a law against people like The Weekly Standard’s contributing editor P.J. O’Rourke, or at least serious investigation by the FDA, the FCC, the TVA, or whatever federal agency it is that regulates prose these days. Everything else has warning labels–my four-year-old daughter’s nightgown had three of them, I noticed yesterday when she put it on backwards over her swimsuit and came downstairs to say she was leaving home to find nicer parents who would buy her a real mermaid. So why don’t certain authors come with warnings? “Do not read me when you have to write yourself” would work, or even, “Put me down, you idiot, you have a deadline in two hours.” G.K. Chesterton is this kind of writer. You can’t read lines like “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors and also to love our enemies, probably because they are generally the same people” without having your own sentences break down into bad attempts at Chestertonian parallels and paradoxes. P.G. Wodehouse is another. When he says of Madeline Bassett, “She holds the view that the stars are God’s daisy-chain . . . and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born, which, as we know, is not the case,” you can’t stop yourself from trying–and failing–to recreate the perfect diction of that “as we know.” Maybe it’s the double initials, but P.J. O’Rourke similarly creates
the unfulfillable desire to write the way he does. His latest, “The CEO of the Sofa,” missed, in the wake of Sept. 11, the attention it deserved. It’s a hilarious walk through a year in the life of an author, loosely modeled on “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.” (“Oliver Wendell Holmes has been agreeing with the CEO’s opinions for nearly 150 years. The CEO’s wife does so less frequently.”) The problem is not just that O’Rourke is funnier than the rest of us. It’s the way he’s funny. It begins with perfect timing for punchlines. When he asks why he’s the one who has to teach his best friend’s son how to drive, his patient wife reminds him, “Nick’s father tried to teach Nick’s sister Ophelia to drive.” “Yes,” he finally remembers, “that made the Metro section of the New York Times.” But what really makes P.J. O’Rourke untouchable is the pacing of his prose. There’s this indescribable speed that drags you from a description of his neighbors through an unbearably funny 6-page intermezzo about the presidential election, only to shoot you out into the deceptions that parents have to practice in order to convince their neighbors with bad political opinions to send their daughters over to babysit. Please, go buy “The CEO of the Sofa.” Read it. Laugh with it. God knows, we need the laughter–as long as you don’t have anything to write yourself. November 12, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 9
