Of Palin’s alleged allies.
A very interesting point of view from Ta-Nehisi Coates on McCain’s selection of Palin as an act not just of cynicism and recklessness but of cruelty towards Palin herself.
(Via Andrew Sullivan.)
Saturday, September 27, 2008
R.I.P.
Paul Newman in a screen test with James Dean:
Best riff yet on Palin.
Hendrick Hertzberg’s blog item in The New Yorker has the best line I’ve read so far about Sarah Palin’s interview with CBS. He makes a game effort to locate a germ of sense in one of her answers to a question by Katie Couric, then says: “The whole thing reads like something rendered from the Finnish by Google Translate.” Read the whole thing here. It’s the item titled “Foreign Countries,” dated Sept. 26.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Bill, flaccid.
Here’s a pretty pungent phillipic on Bill Clinton by Paul Slansky. I can’t find a thing to disagree with.
Buckley.
I always did harbor a certain amount of respect, and even affection, for the late William F. Buckley, Jr. Yes, despite everything–the unspeakable politics, the unreadable prose, the blizzard of affectations swirling around that risible mid-Atlantic accent, and so on. Some years ago I and a few work mates spent a week or two handing back and forth a copy of Buckley’s Marco Polo, If You Can, one of his many Blackford Oakes CIA yarns. Men, I will tell you this: should you be ever abed with your good lady, or with a bad one, and begin to fear an untimely crescendo–well, think about baseball if you must. But if it’s an immediate and decisive, if temporary, blunting of desire that you’re after, keep a copy of Marco Polo, If You Can on the nightstand (or the glove compartment), if you can, and dog-ear the place where Buckley gets his debonair spook laid. The army will stop dead well before the frontier.
All the same, Buckley’s Firing Line was always worth watching, he did a great deal in the ’50s to make overt anti-Semitism untenable within conservative circles, and–as admitted on nearly all sides–he upheld a standard of civility in public discourse that is nowhere in evidence now. He compares pretty favorably, anyway, with the thugs’ carnival that passes for conservatism now. I must also admit that I was genuinely impressed with God and Man at Yale, which Buckley published in his mid-20s, when I read a copy that happened to be lying around a vacation house I was staying in many years ago.
So I have occasionally wondered, in the time since Buckley died in February, how best to pay tribute to him. I think I’ve found it. Here he is with Allen Ginsberg on Firing Line at some point in the late ’60s. Going back, now that Buckley is gone, to this day long ago when he clearly wished he was dead–I don’t know. It feels right.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Tea and smokes with Nabokov and Trilling.
Two clips from some kind of book chat show in the ’50s (I don’t recognize the host) in which Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discuss the just-published Lolita.
And here’s part two:
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Remind you of anything?
From Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1964):
[I]n an atmosphere of fervent malice and humorless imbecility stirred up by [Joseph] McCarthy’s barrage of accusations, the campaign of 1952 dramatized the contrast between intellect and philistinism in the opposing candidates. On one side was Adlai Stevenson, a politician of uncommon mind and style, whose appeal to intellectuals overshadowed anything in recent history. On the other was Dwight D. Eisenhower, conventional in mind, relatively inarticulate, harnessed to the unpalatable Nixon, and waging a campaign whose tone seemed to be set less by the general himself than by his running mate and the McCarthyite wing of his party.
The analogy to this year’s presidential siege-laying may not be perfect in every particular, but when I read this the other day, Stevenson-Eisenhower-Nixon-McCarthyite seemed to change into Obama-McCain-Palin-Rovian before my eyes.
Hey I’m just sayin’.
