The Muhammad Cartoons & Yale
Christopher Caldwell has written in these pages of the craven decision by Yale to censor a book on the Danish cartoon controversy, forcing the author to remove from the manuscript at the eleventh hour not only the cartoons she was writing about, originally published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in the fall of 2005, but several historic illustrations depicting Muhammad. (See his “Drawing Conclusions: A Danish political scientist revisits the cartoon controversy,” in our issue of October 19.)
There was less uproar than one might have hoped to see from the academic community, usually quick on the trigger when it comes to denouncing threats to free expression. Thus it was gratifying to see at least one prominent voice raised to the proper decibel level. Sarah Ruden, whose celebrated translation of the Aeneid was published last year by the offending Yale University Press, wrote a bracing letter to the editor of the New Criterion, which we reproduce in part below:
“I believe that some expression of solidarity on the part of other Yale Press authors like myself is essential. It was just too outrageous that the Yale and Yale University Press administrations cut the images from Jytte Klausen’s book The Cartoons that Shook the World–a book about images and a dispassionate, useful book that could be objectionable only to radical Islam.
“For my own part, I have already banned the Press from bidding on further books of mine. This is, first of all, a self-protective move. I don’t think there’s any coffee good enough that I’d enjoy being told over it that my finished, fully edited manuscript is going to be neutered because of a report I’m not allowed to see without swearing secrecy. Since I write about politics and religion, such a scene is a likely danger for me. But I would urge all authors who are even considering a relationship with the Press to stay away from this non-publisher. A doctor who prostitutes a patient, selling her body, shouldn’t be called a doctor anymore but a pimp. Yale Press, after breaking a crucial relationship of trust with an author’s mind and work, should be called a lickspittle of fanatics and forfeit any respect or consideration from other authors.”
H.J. Kaplan, 1918-2009
H. J. Kaplan–“Kappy” to his friends (and almost everyone who met him was a friend)–died last week in his adopted city of Paris. By dint of his association with Partisan Review in its glory years of the 1940s, Kappy might almost have been considered a founding member of that fiercely disputatious tribe known as the “New York Intellectuals,” except he was never quite a New Yorker, his career took a turn unlike those of his fellow literary intellectuals, and he was anything but fierce.
A sense of the span of his life can be grasped in the fact that he was contributing a regular “Paris Letter” to Partisan Review at the time George Orwell was writing his “London Letter” for the same journal. The Army had interrupted Kappy’s studies of Proust at the University of Chicago, taking him first to Algiers and then to Paris, where he would stay for a decade and return many times thereafter. He introduced the French literary world to its American counterpart in those years and vice versa, both in his writing (he was Raymond Queneau’s translator) and as a famously gregarious host in Paris.
But despite the circles he moved in, his politics were always sane: He was a liberal internationalist and an American patriot to the core. Of genial disposition, he straddled otherwise hostile ideological camps: Years later he wrote of Albert Camus, “our acquaintance was slight. In his famous battle with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir & Co., I was on his side and said so, but it was they who had been my friends.”
Some of those friendships must have been strained by his career in the U.S. Foreign Service, although a search of the memoirs and histories of the Partisan Review set will turn up not an unkind word being said against him, a remarkable record as those steeped in the history of that world can attest. When THE SCRAPBOOK first made his acquaintance 25 years ago as a young writer, he was generosity and sweetness incarnate.
About that Foreign Service career: He was the State Department’s spokes-man in Saigon in 1965 and 1966, defending the war in Vietnam, and later would be the American spokesman in Paris, during the peace talks with the North Vietnamese. He picked up his pen again in the 1980s, with no diminution of literary power and wrote witty and worldly reminiscences of those episodes that are well worth seeking out in the online archives of Commentary magazine.
Condolences to his friends and family, including his son Roger, a valued contributor to these pages.
Farewell, Vic Mizzy
A little over a year ago THE SCRAPBOOK took note of the death of Earle Hagen, composer of innumerable classic television jingles, and in passing mentioned his kinship with “the great Vic Mizzy, whose theme songs for Green Acres and the Addams Family will live as long as Americans pay for cable and watch reruns.” THE SCRAPBOOK is now sadly obliged to report that Vic Mizzy, too, has died, age 93, at his home in Los Angeles.
Mizzy’s genius was not for quantity–Hagen was responsible for many more compositions–but a kind of insidious ability to plant his tunes and lyrics deep in the brain, and make sure that they stayed there, more or less indefinitely. We recently learned about a nursery school in Ashburn, Virginia, that teaches its charges the days of the week by setting their names to the Addams Family melody: “There’s Sunday and there’s Monday, there’s Tuesday and there’s Wednesday . . .”
Both Green Acres and the Addams Family have certain distinctive features that were the hallmark of Vic Mizzy. Both rely on a pair of quarter-notes for periodic emphasis–memorably rendered by snapping fingers in Addams–and both employ unsung phrases to drive home the surreal quality of their subjects: “Neat / Sweet / Petite” for the Addams Family, “Chores / Stores / Fresh air / Times Square” in Green Acres. To THE SCRAPBOOK’s knowledge, no other television theme songs employ these devices, and who remembers those songs today?
The Green Acres song–“I just adore a penthouse view / Darling, I love you, but give me Park Avenue”–is a conventional melody rendered in a comparatively straightforward style. But the Addams Family, which debuted in late 1964, contained certain otherworldly elements that strongly suggested to viewers that the balance of the decade was going to be a bumpy ride.
To be sure, some of the rhymes are a little forced–“spooky / ooky,” “see ’em / scream”–but the multiple harpsichords and voiceovers (Mizzy’s voice, by the way), as well as vignettes of Morticia clipping blossoms off flower stems, a soiled Uncle Fester staring vacantly into the camera, the disembodied Thing enticing viewers–prompt THE SCRAPBOOK to consider the Addams Family the greatest theme song ever written–and that includes 77 Sunset Strip and the Love Boat.
Sentences We Didn’t Finish
“The golden years in American journalism lasted from World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those were the years when international news became a vital source of information that touched the lives of all Americans. Whether they listened to the radio to hear the crisp, haunting reports of CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow from wartime London or . . . ” (Junk News: The Failure of the Media in the 21st Century, by Tom Fenton).</π> <π> Obama’s War
Barack Obama has finally found a war worth fighting and properly resourcing. The enemy is Fox News, and the administration has even deployed America’s most effective weapon–the Obama charisma–to defeat the network that forced its competitors to hold their noses and report on things they would prefer to have ignored: like black separatist, Communist, 9/11 Truthers working inside the administration, and community-organizing pals of the administration counseling a 19-year-old prostitute on how to evade taxes on the profits she would make pimping out a small village of underage Salvadoran girls.
Late last month, the New York Times reported, Obama tried to resolve his differences with the network through his preferred method of conflict resolution–negotiation without precondition. Obama sent senior adviser David Axelrod to New York for a meeting with Fox News Supreme Leader Roger Ailes. The negotiations failed to produce a breakthrough after three weeks–so the administration went to war.
Shockingly, the rest of the media did not fall into line as the Obama administration had almost certainly expected they would. When the White House excluded Fox from a round of interviews with the administration’s pay czar, the other networks expressed their solidarity with their Fox colleagues by refusing to conduct their own interviews until the White House reversed course. And of course the White House did reverse course (not that America’s enemies should deduce from this that the Obama administration is easily rolled).
Even for Ken Rudin, the political editor at National Public Radio’s Washington bureau, the administration had embarrassed itself. On NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Rudin spoke truth to power:
The comparison to Nixon must have caused too many NPR listeners to spit out their lattes. Because 24 hours later, Rudin apologized. “Comparing the tactics of the Nixon administration–which bugged and intimidated and harassed journalists–to that of the Obama administration was foolish, facile, ridiculous and, ultimately, embarrassing to me,” Rudin wrote. “I should have known better and, in fact, I do know better.” Rumors of an overnight stay and waterboarding at NPR reeducation camp cannot be confirmed.
Life Imitates Parody
We thought we were exaggerating a bit in last week’s Parody when we compared Harry Reid to Darth Vader–Reid’s son, Rory, is running for governor. Both father and son will be on the same ticket next year, leading us to suspect that together they will rule the galaxy. Or at least the state of Nevada. But then we get word from the Washington Times that an anonymous member of Harry Reid’s staff said they would “vaporize” their opponent. Just like the time Lord Vader vaporized the planet Alderaan. Perhaps Reid senses something; a presence he hasn’t felt since . . . 1994?
