Ring Lardner would feel right at home in today’s political environment.  Whatever the issue — gun control, affirmative action, taxes — genuine debate and open conversation have taken a back seat to hectoring intolerance.  As Lardner put it in The Young Immigrunts:

Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly.
Shut up he explained.

Consider the issue of immigration reform.  You would think there was plenty of room for debate about this contentious issue.  One of the most thoughtful commentators on immigration is Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, who among other writings has contributed an essay on the subject to the Broadside series at Encounter Books. But Krikorian, the CIS, and other conservative organizations have become targets of whispering, behind-closed-doors smear campaign that seeks to delegitimize their work and, by a bizarre logic I find unfathomable, paint them as part of a left-wing abortionist cabal.  The Washington Post has a story about this sorry intramural attempt to stifle debate.  “I haven’t heard folks take on the substantive arguments CIS is making and saying why they’re wrong,” the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky is quoted as saying.  “Instead you just get these scurrilous attacks.”  Scurrilous indeed.

It’s no contest for me. I am not going to be listening Barack Obama tell us how much more of our money he wants to take to pay for his fiscal incontinence. My cardiologist, worried about my blood pressure, forbids me to listen to Barack Obama in general.  A “State of the (dis)Union” address would send him (and probably me) into orbit. Who is he going to insult tonight? The Supreme Court again? No, they gave him the monstrosity of ObamaCare. Maybe it will be some prominent supporter of the Second Amendment or a high profile advocate of limited government or economic growth. I just can;t bear it, and, besides, it will be impossible to escape the cataract of commentary before Barack Obama’s teleprompter’s go dark.  Instead, I am going to curl up with Anthony Trollope’s splendid biography of Marcus Tullius Cicero.  As I mentioned here recently, I have been reading around in Cicero a bit recently. The parallels between his corrupt times and our own are painful and inescapable. “Whoever governs a country,” Cicero wrote in On Duties,  “must first see that citizens keep what belongs to them and that the state does not take from individuals what is rightfully theirs. . . . Indeed, the chief reason we have a constitution  and government at  all is to protect individual property. Even though nature led people to come together into communities in the first place, they did so with the hope that they could keep what rightfully belonged to them.”

Are you listening, Barack Obama?  Of course not. You are too busy spending, spending, spending, then taxing, taxing, taxing, to listen. But others are listening. It won’t be long before thinkers like Cicero are once again in the public eye. And not only Cicero, but other Romans and Roman practices. I would not be at all surprised if the custom of the custom of damnatio memoriae, for example, made a sudden come back.

Matt Drudge does it again:

First this:

OBAMA: Job of debt reduction nearly done…

$16.48 trillion and growing…

Then this:

Military warns cuts will ‘hollow’ force…

DOD to extend benefits to same-sex partners…

Over the years, Andrew McCarthy has written many important articles about what in the bad old days of President Bush was called “the War on Terror.” As a former federal prosecutor, he brings a rare authority and insight to the complex questions that surround this shadowy precinct of national security. He has actually met, and helped put away, some very bad guys, including the so-called “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman, currently serving a life sentence in one of Uncle Sam’s many official guest houses for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other acts of violence (including the 1997 Luxor massacre that left 62 people, mostly tourists, dead and mutilated).

Central aspects of McCarthy’s thinking about these issues — both the war against terror itself and the novel legal challenges that prosecuting that war poses for a constitutional democracy — are laid out in Willful Blindness, his 2008 memoir of prosecuting the blind sheikh, and The Grand Jihad, his 2010 anatomy of how the ideologies of Islam and the Left conspire to undermine political and religious freedom. Just a couple months ago, he supplemented these studies with Spring Fever, an acerbic look at the fatuous naïveté that allowed — and continues to allow — so many credulous observers to embrace the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and kindred groups in Africa and the Middle East as the burgeoning of an “Arab Spring.” I am proud to say that all of these books were published by Encounter Books, whose helm I guide.

What makes me mention McCarthy’s work just now, however, is “The Problems of the White Paper,” the splendid piece of political-legal analysis he offered readers a couple of days ago in his NRO column. It is a must-read.

There has been a lot of comment, and even more hand-wringing, about the draft report that just surfaced from Obama’s Justice Department outlining “the circumstances in which the U.S. Government could use lethal force [read: drone attack] in a foreign country outside the area of active hostilities against a U.S. citizen” who is a member of al-Qaeda or “an associated force.”  Talk about duck and cover! Will Karl Rove now have to watch his back?  There have even been a few good cartoons on the subject:

There are, as McCarthy points out, two important lessons to be learned from the report. One concerns hypocrisy. Candidate Obama and lawyer Eric Holder were ostentatious critics of President Bush’s strategy of dealing with terrorists. Obama the candidate, remember, promised to close Guantanamo Bay, professed to be horrified by waterboarding, and insisted that “our values” and our national security were deeply “intertwined.” And before he became attorney general, Eric Holder actually volunteered his services to the enemy.

“At the time,” McCarthy points out, “he was a senior partner at a firm that was among the Lawyer Left’s most eager to provide free legal help to al-Qaeda enemy combatants in their lawsuits against the American people.” Among other things, Holder “filed an amicus brief on behalf of Jose Padilla, an American citizen turned al-Qaeda operative who was sent to the United States by Khalid Sheikh Mohamed in 2002 to attempt a post-9/11 ‘second wave’ of mass-murder attacks.”

Just the sort of chaps you want running the country, right?

Well, the American people have made that bed, and now they have to sleep in it. McCarthy is right about the “breathtaking hypocrisy” emanating from the Obama administration in general and from the Justice Department in particular. He cites chapter and verse about this, and for any Democrat whose sense of shame is intact, contemplating the facts would be a squirm-inducing experience.

Joseph Epstein’s amusing Wall Street Journal article about The New York Review of Books the other day reminded me that it had been a long time since I had actually read anything in that once essential-seeming organ of the formerly chic Leftist establishment. Still, it’s clear from simply glancing at the Review that its politics haven’t changed over the years — it’s still predictably anti-American and anti-Israel. But as Mr. Epstein points out, its pool of talent has shrunk dramatically.  Where the Review once featured such A-list intellectuals as W.H. Auden and Hannah Arendt,  at their recent 50th anniversary celebration the marquee names included Joan Didion, Daryl Pinckney (who?), and Daniel Mendelsohn.

Ho, I mean to say, hum.

The New York Review  was never what one would call a beneficent force in American intellectual life, but there was a time when it was a conspicuous megaphone for the Left.  I wrote at some length about the NYRB in my book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America and now that the Review is celebrating its golden anniversary, I thought I would share those thoughts with my PJM readers. I called the piece “A Nostalgia for Molotovs” and opened with two epigraphs:

From the beginning it was pointless to argue about the sincerity of Radical Chic. Unquestionably the basic impulse, “red diaper” or otherwise, was sincere. But, as in most human endeavors focused upon an ideal, there seemed to be some double-track thinking going on. —Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic, 1970

He oscillated . . . between identification with the Communists and violent hostility towards them. . . . At every stage, however, he endeavored to preserve his own reputation as a “Leftist,” and even to represent himself and his philosophy as the embodiment of “Leftism” par excellence. Consequently, even when attacking the Communists and reviled by them he made a point of directing far more vehement attacks against the forces of reaction, the bourgeoisie, or the United States Government.
—Leszek Kolakowski, on Jean-Paul Sartre, 1978

I went on as follows:

Barbecuing pork

On December 4, 1969, The New York Review of Books published “The Trial of Bobby Seale.” This special supplement contained a partial transcript of the 1969 trial of the infamous Black Panther leader who—along with Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and other members of the “Chicago Seven”—was on trial in Chicago for conspiracy to incite a riot. (Seale was also facing a first-degree murder charge in New Haven.) The trial riveted the nation’s attention. The disturbances instigated by Hayden (who said he expected twenty-five people to die in the melee) and others on the occasion of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 had already emerged as an iconic moment in the mythology of the counterculture. The episode was as significant in its way as the Woodstock music festival or college anti-war demonstrations.

The transcript published in The New York Review covers the proceedings of one afternoon in which a mistrial was declared and Seale was cited for contempt of court. (At one point, his conduct had been so obstreperous that the court ordered him bound and gagged.) The transcript was prefaced with an essay by Jason Epstein, a co-founder of The New York Review. It is a remarkable document. Epstein, like most leftists at the time, was clearly sympathetic to Seale. He was also clearly contemptuous of Judge Julius Hoffman, the presiding magistrate. Epstein assured his readers that the source of Judge Hoffman’s authority was “not in his juridical wisdom” (which, he claimed, was “hardly remarkable”) but “in an unmistakable theatrical gift.” The transcript was supposed to corroborate these contentions. It was also supposed to garner support for Seale. Epstein assured his readers that the evidence against him “was sparse.” The charges against the other defendants, too, Epstein suggested, were “metaphysically conceived.” Seale himself, Epstein explained, “had been invited to come [to Chicago] only at the last minute as a substitute for Eldridge Cleaver.” How then could he have been involved in a conspiracy?  In Seale’s case, according to Epstein, the evidence consisted of the allegation by an “undercover policeman” (read: an untrustworthy witness) that Seale, at a rally organized by Hayden and others, had urged his audience to “barbecue some pork.” Over the objection of the defense, Judge Hoffman construed this to mean “burn some pigs,” that is, policemen. Epstein did not offer his own interpretation of the phrase. Instead he launched into an exposition of the convoluted law governing conspiracy. It does not take any special hermeneutical gifts, however, to understand what Bobby Seale intended in his speech. What he said was, “If a pig comes up to us and starts swinging a billy club, and you check around and you got your piece, you got to down that pig in defense of yourself! We’re gonna barbecue some pork!” After Seale’s performance, Tom Hayden told the crowd to “make sure that if blood is going to flow, it will flow all over the city.”

“The Trial of Bobby Seale” was typical of the political reporting one could expect to find in The New York Review in the late Sixties. It was the kind of piece that gave the paper its special place in the annals of America’s cultural revolution. Plenty of other publications—Ramparts, for example, and Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, even old-Left stalwarts like The Nation—played important roles in defining the counterculture and propagating its spirit and its ideas. (The advertisements that ran in such publications in the late 1960s also give one a good sense of the radical atmosphere of the times.  Among the ads one finds accompanying “The Trial of Bobby Seale,” for example, is one for “the first-run campus premiere” of Fidel, a film brought to the world by “Review Presentations,” an offshoot of The New York Review of Books.  This “startling new film on Fidel and Cuba today” is described as “an extraordinary in-depth report on Fidel and the continuing revolution. Beautifully photographed in color, it shows Fidel among his people, listening, arguing, philosophizing, laughing, cajoling, reminiscing” and includes “a very moving section on Che called ‘The Ballad of Che Guevara.’ ”) Some of these publications were explicitly devoted to promoting the drug culture, rock music, and sexual “liberation”; some were openly Marxist, frankly admiring of Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and other totalitarian leaders; all were infused with some version of political radicalism. And as the Sixties wore on, all were “against the war” in Vietnam—that is, against U.S. intervention in Vietnam—and adamantly opposed to the use of American military power. But none commanded anything like the intellectual cachet that The New York Review enjoyed and, to a lesser extent, continues to enjoy among the left-liberal intelligentsia. And none was, at that critical moment in the Sixties, quite so effective—or quite so pernicious—in helping to institutionalize the gospel of political radicalism among America’s intellectual elite.

It is a curious story. The New York Review was the brainchild largely of Jason Epstein, the publishing wunderkind who created the distinguished paperback lines of Anchor Books at Doubleday and Vintage Books at Random House. By the late 1950s, the need for a serious, general-interest review was patent. The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick, who was then married to Robert Lowell and who went on to become advisory editor at The New York Review, summed up the received feeling in “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” which Harper’s published in 1959:

 Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns. A book is born into a puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory. Everyone is found to have “filled a need,” and is to be “thanked” for something and to be excused for “minor faults in an otherwise excellent work.”

As Philip Nobile put it in Intellectual Skywriting, his intermittently hagiographic history of the first ten years of The New York Review, “everybody talked about a new book review, but nobody did anything about it.”

The necessary spur came during the 114-day printers’ strike in 1962-63. The strike shut down all the major New York newspapers, including The New York Times and the Herald Tribune, whose book pages, along with those of The Saturday Review, constituted the main sources of book reviews and, not incidentally, the chief venues for book advertising. (Looking back on the reviewing scene in The New York Review’s second issue in the summer of 1963, Edmund Wilson remarked that “the disappearance of the Times Sunday book section at the time of the printers’ strike only made us realize it had never existed.”)

Although Epstein’s association with Random House precluded his being the editor of the contemplated new book review, his energy, connections, and organizational acumen brought The New York Review into being. It was a fateful stroke that led him to appoint the precocious Robert B. Silvers as editor. (Epstein’s wife, Barbara Epstein, was co-editor from the beginning until her death in 2006, but it was always Silvers who imparted to the Review much of its intellectual and nearly all of its ideological sheen.)

Filling a need

Then in his early thirties, Silvers had been working as an editor at Harper’s since 1959. Something of a child prodigy, Silvers had matriculated at the University of Chicago in 1945 at the tender age of sixteen. He was graduated two and a half years later after, Nobile reports, “having numerous requirements waived.” Silvers was briefly press secretary for Connecticut Governor Chester Bowles, Jr., in 1950, after which he went to the Yale Law School for a few semesters. He then joined the U.S. Army, which posted him to Paris. In the mid-Fifties, Paris was still Sartre’s Paris: a Paris in which—among intellectuals, anyway—anti-Americanism was as de rigueur as were brittle intellectual snobbery and left-wing politics. Silvers seems to have found it an intoxicating combination. He lingered in Paris for some six years, absorbing the atmosphere and graduating from the Ecole des Sciences Politiques (where he met Raymond Aron) in 1956. He also worked part of the time for George Plimpton’s newly launched Paris Review (to which he contributed an interview with the novelist Françoise Sagan in 1956). His energy and editorial flair were apparent from the beginning. John P. C. Train, then managing editor of the Paris Review, recalls a “shy but formidable” figure who “made the Paris Review what it was.”

When the Algerian conflict escalated, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) embarked on a program of atrocities explicitly “designed to provoke the French army into savage reprisals.” The policy succeeded. Torture had been officially abolished in France in 1789, but within a few years the French army had been provoked into authorizing the torture of Algerian prisoners to extract information about terrorist plans. The result, as the historian Paul Johnson noted, was “a competition of terror.” The cause of Algerian independence was taken up by all right-thinking (that is, left-leaning) intellectuals. (Of course, the practice of torture by the French army was roundly condemned across the ideological spectrum.) Declaring that colonials had replaced the proletariat in the hierarchy of the oppressed, Sartre called upon French workers to “support Algerian fighters” in their efforts “to break the fetters of colonization.” Numerous first-hand accounts of atrocities perpetrated by the French army were published, much to the consternation of the French authorities. Sartre himself contributed a preface to one such contraband pamphlet, Henri Alleg’s La Question, thus conferring unimpeachable prestige on this mode of political activism. Alleg’s pamphlet provoked moral outrage throughout France. At the request of John Fischer, the editor of Harper’s, Silvers translated a chapter of another such report, La Gangrène, a grisly account by four Algerians of their torture in Paris at the hands of the French police.

I mention these details because the intellectual and political posture—indeed, even the social posture—of The New York Review clearly owes a great deal to Silvers’s extended holiday in Paris. By all accounts, Silvers is as shy of personal publicity as Sartre was addicted to it; and where Sartre was a graphomaniac who wrote and published millions of words, Silvers seems early on to have decided against writing. According to Philip Nobile, Silvers’s only published writing, apart from the two items mentioned above, is “A Letter to a Young Man About to Enter Publishing,” which ran, anonymously, in a supplement to Harper’s about “Writing in America” in 1959. (He also published an interview with “David Burg,” the pen name of a young Soviet defector, in Harper’s in May 1961.) Silvers has disputed the influence of Sartre, claiming that his own views were more informed by the example of Sartre’s great critic Raymond Aron. But he brought to his editorship of The New York Review—especially in the 1960s and early 1970s—an engagé attitude very similar to that perfected by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1950s and 1960s:  relentlessly haughty, cerebral, cliquish, at once socially ambitious and disdainful of society, ever in search of approved gauchiste “causes,” instinctively anti-American.

The trick was knowing how and when to mix these qualities—which to emphasize, which to downplay—and at this task Silvers quickly proved himself a master. In the beginning, highbrow elements, leavened by celebrity, predominated. The first, trial issue of The New York Review was cobbled together on short notice in the winter of 1963.

The very bulk of the issue was a testament that its time had come. It contained forty-odd pieces, including F. W. Dupee on James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Dwight Macdonald on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Politics of Hope, Philip Rahv (a founding editor of Partisan Review) on Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Mary McCarthy on William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and W. H. Auden on David Jones’s Anathemata; there were also reviews by Norman Mailer, Lionel Abel, Steven Marcus, Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, and Alfred Kazin; Robert Penn Warren contributed a poem, Irving Howe wrote about The Partisan Review Anthology. William Phillips, another founding editor of Partisan Review, reviewed Elias Canetti’s huge book Crowds and Power. Richard Poirier wrote about Frank Kermode, William Styron wrote about Frank Tannenbaum, Midge Decter wrote about recent novels, and Robert Jay Lifton wrote about Arata Ossada’s Children of the A-Bomb. Elizabeth Hardwick contributed two pieces, as did Robert Lowell (an obituary of Robert Frost, who had just died, and a poem) and John Berryman (a review of Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand and three “Dream Songs”).

My friend Roger Simon, CEO of PJ Media, today announces his imminent retirement from that august position. Roger’s announcement makes me realize to my astonishment that I, at his invitation, have been contributing to PJ (formerly “Pajamas”) media now for more than six years. Yikes! That has been the quickest 2300 or so days on record, at least on my record.

I first met Roger (I think of him as “the other Roger,” but he assures me that’s my name) when he was working on Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine, his unputdownable memoir of growing up Left as a Hollywood screenwriter and what it was like when he began entertaining second thoughts. I am proud to have published the book at Encounter, just as I am proud to have collaborated with Roger on inaugurating the Walter Duranty Award for Journalistic Mendacity (first winner, Anna Wintour) and to have published The Party Line, the riveting play about Duranty by Roger and his wife Sheryl Longin, as the inaugural volume in The New Criterion’s new publishing initiative Criterion Books.

But Roger’s announcement that he will be hanging up his managerial (though not his writerly) spurs at PJM next week prompts me to reflect on all that he and his PJM colleagues have accomplished both with the web site and the new Internet TV initiative. PJM may not rival Fox in size, but is there a more vigorous center-right purveyor of news and opinion going? Let’s leave my own contributions out of the equation and look at the other talent Roger has assembled: Andrew McCarthy, Victor Davis Hanson, Ron Radosh, David Goldman, Michael Ledeen,Andrew Klavan, Bill Whittle, Richard Fernandez, Claudia Rosett, Michael Walsh, Ed Driscoll, Helen Smith, and on and on. Is there a stronger stable anywhere? I doubt it. And add to the mix Glenn Reynolds and Instapundit, whom Roger brought into the PJM fold, and you have one of the most formidable journalistic teams on offer. I think Roger has done an amazing job at PJM and I have been delighted to be part of his effort to take back America.

As Roger says, he is not going away. He’ll just be taking fewer meetings and penning fewer memoranda. In compensation, he will be devoting a lot more time to his first literary loves, writing screenplays and novels. I look forward to the next installments. In the meantime, hearty congratulations to Roger for his inspiring leadership and role in creating a great institution.

****

See also: Vodkapundit and Neo-Neocon react.

Image courtesy shutterstock / EDHAR

I have been thinking about the Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero lately. Like many people of my generation, my first recollection when hearing the name “Cicero” is of interminable Latin sentences where the critical word is parked like a caboose about thirty words later than you would have expected it, and in a gerundive construction suggesting causation or obligation. Or was it a double dative? In any event, in school Cicero was someone to be deciphered rather than understood. He didn’t like Catiline, whoever that was, but what has that to do with the market in ablative absolutes?

Now that I look back to Cicero’s life and work, however, few figures from any age seem as searingly pertinent to our own social and political life.

There is a reason Cicero’s work made such a profound impression on the American Founders. John Adams, reacting to a biography of Cicero, cut to the chase: “I seem to read the history of all ages and nations in every page — and especially the history of our own country for forty years past. Change the names and every anecdote will be applicable to us.”

Consider this passage from Cicero’s On Duties:

 Whoever governs a country must first see to it that citizens keep what belongs to them and that the state does not take from individuals what is rightfully theirs. … As for those politicians who pretend they are friends of the common people and try to pass laws redistributing property and drive people out of their homes or champion legislation forgiving loans, I say they are undermining the very foundations of our state. They are destroying social harmony, which cannot exist when you take away money from some to give it to others. They are also destroying fairness, which vanishes when people cannot keep what rightfully belongs to them. For as I have said, it is the proper role of government to guard the right of citizens to control their own property.

It’s hard to believe that was written circa 44 BC, not the day before yesterday.

I intend to come back to Cicero at greater length on another occasion. For now, I simply want to wave the Ciceronian flag a little and suggest that his magnificent attacks on corruption and the abuse of state power have many lessons for Americans at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Consider the news, which was reported just yesterday by the Wall Street Journal, that the Justice Department is suing the rating company Standard & Poor’s “in retaliation for the S&P’s temerity in downgrading U.S. sovereign debt for the first time in history in 2011.”

Oops! That was the unexpurgated version. The announced reason the Department of Justice is going after the company is because “the firm ignored its own standards to rate mortgage bonds that imploded in the financial crisis and cost investors billions.”

I’d met but did not really know Ed Koch, who died this morning at 88. I admired his energy, jocular persona, and (mostly) his emanations (it was more than just an influence) as a politician, especially his  decade-long tenure (1978-1989) as mayor of New York.

Koch was a species of liberal that scarcely exists anymore on the national stage: a liberal, as he liked to put it, “with sanity.” The sanity acted as a prophylactic against the sort of racialist identity politics that  helped make the mayoralty of David Dinkins, Koch’s successor, such a conspicuous disaster. It also underwrote his relative independence as a political actor. Thus Koch, in 2004, crossed party lines to endorse George W. Bush, not so much because he agreed with all of Dubya’s platform but because he understood that that United States was under threat from a mortal, if also amorphous, enemy, and Koch was an unembarrassed patriot.

“How’m I doing?”  Koch used to beam as he paraded about the streets of  New York. Koch loved the bustling chaos of New York and he loved New Yorkers. He really was a man of the people, gobbling up Chinese food, his warm-hearted but no-nonsense presence a palpable feature  of  the city’s daily life. Not for Koch the Cloistered Imperial Nannydom that swaddles the repellent billionaire Michael Bloomberg, surrounded by armed bodyguards as he prosecutes from afar his war against salt, sugar, tobacco, guns and other pleasures of the plebs.

As I say, I never really knew Ed Koch, but I admired him from afar.  He was, I think, the second best mayor New York has had within the compass of my recollection. (Prize for first place must go to Rudy Guiliani, not only for his masterly handling of the crisis following 9/11 but also for his successful battle against crime and general squalor.) Koch was a character: lovable and irascible by turns. He came to office at a difficult moment. I’m not sure that it can be said that he turned the city around after the assaults of the 1960s and  dégringolade of the mid-1970s. But he certainly helped buck up the populace. One of my favorite anecdotes: When one of the main bridges into Manhattan was closed for a protracted period, a reporter acidly asked Hizzoner what he intended to do about it. “Tell my driver to take another route,” was his sensible reply.

Gertrude Stein, who wasn’t wrong about everything, once asked the rhetorical question: “What do writers want?”  And she answered: “Praise, praise, praise, praise, praise.”  It’s an occupational hazard, a déformation professionelle, and if it is pointed out that the profession  in question is really the full time occupation of being a member of the species homo sapiens sapiens, I would agree, with the qualification that writers are in a category by themselves. (Well, almost by themselves: they share the honor with artists and some others.)

No one ever gets sufficient praise, of course — sufficient, I mean, from a subjective point of view — but writers are surely among the most voracious consumers of what Joseph Epstein (a writer himself) once called “Vitamin P.”

What occasions this chastening thought is the pleasure I’ve been taking these last couple of days from Wilfred McClay’s gratifyingly hyperbolic review of my latest book The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia in the University Bookman, a tradition-minded review that was started several decades ago by the great Russell Kirk.

Check it out. You’ll see why I am second to no one in my admiration of Mr. McClay’s perspicacity, not to mention the wisdom of the editor of that fine literary organ The University Bookman, a venerable site that, I think you’ll agree, should be much better known than it is.

Did I mention that you, too, can participate in this literary festivity by the simple expedient of    giving Amazon.com some attention? The hardcover is available for a modest consideration here, the Kindle version for an even more modest consideration here.

I think Andrew McCarthy wins the line of the day contest this morning with the opening of his National Review essay “Apes, Pigs, and F-16s.” The F16s, as anyone following the news knows, are the advanced U.S. fighter jets that we’re crating up and sending to our good friend Mohammed Morsi, the president of Egypt and Muslim Brotherhood hater of America and Jews.

Does that strike you as “extreme”? Does it sound “impolitic”? Yet another instance of Kimball’s errant right-wingery? Forget I said it then. Let’s go straight to the horse’s mouth, i.e., to President Morsi’s description of Israelis — “Zionists” — as “blood-suckers,” “warmongers,” the “descendants of apes and pigs.”

As Andy points out, the menagerie is actually quite large: “When Mohamed Morsi dehumanizes Jews as ‘the descendants of apes and pigs,’ there’s an elephant in the room.”

The elephant in question is drawn from that bestiary know as the Koran, speifically Sura 5:60, where we read that

Those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil — these are many times worse in rank, and far more astray from the even Path!

(Andrew Bostom has assembled a trove of other examples of how the religion of peace views Jews here: “‘In Context’: Muhammad Morsi’s (Islamically Correct) Jew-Hatred.”) The point, as Andy McCarthy notes, is that

Contrary to the fairy tale weaved by apologists for Islamists on both sides of America’s political aisle, Jew hatred is not a pathogen insidiously injected into Islam by the Nazis. . . .   Nor did the ummah come by it through exposure to other strains of anti-Semitism that blight the history of Christendom. Jew hatred is ingrained in Islamic doctrine. Consequently, despite the efforts of enlightened Muslim reformers, Jew hatred is — and will remain — a pillar of Islamist ideology.

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