Better Angels

Review of 'A Slobbering Love Affair': Goldberg is no Freddoso

The first complete book I read using the iPhone Kindle app is Bernard Goldberg's A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media. I paid the standard "new book" Kindle price of $9.99, which given the length of the book (very short) and the lack of new insight, I consider about $7 too much.

And maybe three bucks is being too kind, not because there's no insight in this book, but because there is absolutely not one word or fact that any reader of non-liberal blogs wouldn't have been aware of for months by now. Using Google to do a review of blog posts on the mainstream media's treatment of Obama would get you as much or more information in short order at no cost.

And frankly, that's what I recommend you do if you are curious about the subject.

It seems to me there are two potential audiences for this book. The first audience is those people who weren't obsessively reading blogs throughout the campaign season, who are not "in the tank" liberals, and who now want to understand how our President came to be elected. The second is the people of the future: Those who, years or decades hence, want to look back on and understand this election. Unfortunately, neither of these audiences is served, for pretty much the same reason.

That is, this book strangely assumes a pretty intimate knowledge of the just-completed campaign. So it's preaching to people who by definition already know the details. Two key examples:

Joe the Plumber: Goldberg devotes a "chapter" to Joe (where chapter is defined as a couple of pages, near as I could tell, having to judge while reading in a format not conducive to communicating page count) in which he does not explain little details like:

• Who Joe the Plumber is.

• How he came to interact with Obama.

• What questions he asked of Obama.

• How he ended up a public figure.

• Why the media and the left felt he was important enough to publicly destroy (beyond the simple statement that he was going after their candidate).

What's left is a jumble of mini-facts about how the media went after Joe for not being a plumber and for owing back taxes. Any reader not fully versed in who Joe is will be left bewildered about why this chapter is even in the book and will come away not one whit more clueful about the situation. It reads like some notes thrown together and included in the book by accident.

Sarah Palin: While Goldberg provides a bit more content about Palin, it's still a scattered mess lacking context. He launches into a list of things the media called her without any summary of her history, her political views, how she was introduced to the country, why people were surprised by her inclusion on the ticket, etc. He references Andrew Sullivan's conspiracy theory about Trig not being Palin's child without having previously mentioned who Trig is, explaining what the conspiracy theory was, providing a single detail debunking it, or discussing how this bizarre theory came about or held on.

Suffice it to say this is no The Making of the President, 1960 or even The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate.

I regret that I didn't post a review of David Freddoso's excellent Case Against when I read it, and perhaps I'll go back and rectify that soon. For our current purposes, suffice it to say that given an author who I was warned was a wacko partisan, I was pleasantly surprised to find that his book was no screed. It was instead a calm fact-filled look at the political history of Obama, providing insight on the man and politician through well-researched history organized in an engaging and in-depth manner. Its only agenda and conclusion (spoiler!) was to call on the reader to treat Obama as a politician like any other politician, which is what he is. This is a book that in years hence researchers and academics will be able to reference and learn from (not that they will, but they could!). This is a book that anyone, no matter how well-versed going in, is likely to learn a number of new things from.

Goldberg's book, on the other hand, may well leave you knowing less than you did before you started reading it.

If you feel this review is overly short and doesn't provide nearly enough information about what Goldberg covers...well, then you know exactly how I felt on finishing his book.

Excerpts From 'Reading Lolita in Tehran On the iPhone Kindle App'

"Criminals should not be tried. The trial of a criminal is against human rights. Human rights demand that we should have killed them in the first place when it became known that they were criminals."

-- Ayatollah Khomeini

I don't have a Kindle but I do have an iPhone, so when Amazon released the Kindle app for the iPhone, I was interested in seeing how workable it is to read a book on the phone. Given that I often spend hours a day reading blog posts and email on the phone, doesn't seem like too much of a stretch, and so far so good.

My inaugural book is Reading Lolita in Tehran, a book simultaneously deconstructing Nabokov and discussing the life of women in Islamic Iran. I have mixed feelings about the prose, but it is growing on me. More important than any feelings about the quality of the writing, there are a few sequences that really jumped out at me so far and I thought I'd go ahead and share them.

The first just emphasizes the...well, you don't need me to put up neon signs for this, just read it yourself:

"I have to tell you that the Ayatollah himself was no novice in sexual matters," Nassrin went on. "I've been translating his magnum opus, The Political, Philosophical, Social and Religious Principles of Ayatollah Khomeini, and he has some interesting points to make."

"But it's already been translated," said Manna. "What's the point?"

"Yes," said Nassrin, "parts of it have been translated, but after it became the butt of party jokes, ever since the embassies abroad found out that people were reading the book not for their edification but for fun, the translations have been very hard to find. And anyway, my translation is thorough -- it has references and cross-references to works by other worthies. Did you know that one way to cure a man's sexual appetites is by having sex with animals? And then there's the problem of sex with chickens. You have to ask yourself if a man who has had sex with a chicken can then eat the chicken afterwards. Our leader has provided us with an answer: No, neither he nor his immediate family or next-door neighbors can eat of that chicken's meat, but it's okay for a neighbor who lives two doors away."

On the darker side...

A fortnight earlier, Sanaz and five of her girl-friends had gone for a two-day vacation by the Caspian Sea. On their first day, they had decided to visit her friend's fiance in an adjoining villa. Sanaz kept emphasizing that they were all properly dressed, with their scarves and long robes. They were all sitting outside, in the garden: six girls and one boy. There were no alcoholic beverages in the hour, no undesirable tapes or CDs. She seemed to be suggesting that if there had been, they might have deserved the treatment they received at the hands of the Revolutionary Guards.

And then "they" came with their guns, the morality squads, surprising them by jumping over the low walls. They claimed to have received a report of illegal activities, and wanted to search the premises. Unable to find fault with their appearance, one of the guards sarcastically said that looking at them, with their Western attitudes...What is a Western attitude? Nassrin interrupted. Sanaz looked at her and smiled. I'll ask him next time I run into him. The truth of the matter was that their search for alcoholic beverages, tapes and CDs had led to nothing, but they already had a search warrant and didn't want it to go to waste. The guards took all of them to a special jail for infractions in matters of morality. There, despite their protests, the girls were kept in a small, dark room, which they shared the first night with several prostitutes and a drug addict. Their jail wardens came into their room two or three times in the middle of the night to wake up those who might have dozed off, and hurled insults at them.

They were held in that room for forty-eight hours. Despite their repeated requests, they were denied the right to call their parents. Apart from brief excursions to the rest room at appointed times, they left the room twice -- the first time to be led to a hospital, where they were given virginity tests by a woman gynecologist, who had her students observe the examinations. Not satisfied with her verdict, the guards took them to a private clinic for a second check.

To summarize the rest of that story, the parents are told the girls were killed in a car accident, then finally manage to get them out but the girls are subjected to twenty-five lashes, and to top it all off Sanaz is treated as having brought this on herself by her parents and brother and is from then on subjected to more restrictions in her life.

If you ever find yourself slipping into that "all culture is relative" point of view wherein each country is basically the same, some with burqas and some without, I recommend grabbing a copy of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel, discussed in this post or Reading Lolita or heck any of the slew of "I was a woman in an Islamic state" books out there, several of which are on my audiobook list and which I'll no doubt discuss here after I listen to them.

Whatever you believe about how the US should interact with Islamic countries at a political level, it's important to remember the point of view of some of those, especially women, who have to actually live under the conditions imposed on them by Sharia law. In addition to Sharia law, there is this "manifest destiny"-style Islamic revolution concept that many of the leaders follow, and when you see Canada or Britain or France dealing with these issues it's particularly striking to recall those countries that, just a few years ago, were more or less Western-style democracies and are no longer.

As one of the sayings of Islamic revolutionaries goes:

One man, one vote, one time.

In Defense of World War II

In his recent book Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, Patrick Buchanan argues, as described in the Amazon blurb:

Were World Wars I and II—which can now be seen as a thirty-year paroxysm of slaughter and destruction—inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Were the bloodiest and most devastating conflicts ever suffered by mankind fated by forces beyond men’s control? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment? In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen—Winston Churchill first among them—the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe’s central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations.

I haven't read the book, and am unlikely to put significant time to anything by Buchanan, but I found the discussion in Peter Robinson's Uncommon Knowledge podcast, with Christopher Hitchens and Victor David Hanson, to be quite illuminating:

I actually listened to it in podcast form, though that entry doesn't appear to be in the podcast feed any longer. However, you can subscribe to the Uncommon Knowledge audio podcast or video podcast for Uncommon Knowledge using those URLs (it's darn difficult to find those URLs, too!)

Finally, you can find it chopped into several segments at this site.

I do all the legwork so you don't have to!

Hamlet dressers and other infidels

I know I'm just an unsentimental bastard, but if there's one thing I hate in the typical biography or auto-biography, it's the standard requirement to spend quality time telling us the in-depth history of the grandparents immigrating to a new country and their trials and tribulations, then the many events that befell their children before one of them got married, had some rough times, became an encyclopedia salesman, then produced the author, who was born in a small hospital before being potty trained...enough already!

After a couple of hundred pages, finally the author starts talking about the special skill or act that is the reason I actually bought the tome in the first place. It's not that back story can't be interesting, but I want some traction with the real person to make me care enough to slog through all the back story.

So I was delighted to discover the first author I've found who really understands this principle, as demonstrated by his memoir, Hamlet's Dresser:

I actually listened to the audiobook, read by the author, which is the ideal way to experience most auto-biographies, and this is no exception.

The author, Bob Smith, does something almost unheard of for a memoir: He starts at the most interesting part, telling a little story from late in his life. Then he jumps elsewhere in time and tells another story. Not unlike Billy Pilgrim of Vonnegut's Slaughter-house Five, Bob Smith seems unstuck in time. He keeps jumping and telling stories, and the reader gets to stitch them together, make connections, and uncover the threads of his life.

It brings to mind staying up all night with a good friend, drinking and listening to him tell random stories, and at the end of the long night you realize you know something deep about this person. That's what this book is. I won't bother summarizing what happened in his life, as that's why you should read or listen to the book; really, nothing particularly big did happen to Bob Smith. He likes Shakespeare a lot, and he got to work as a dresser on productions for John Houseman, and, well, if either of those things means anything to you, read the damn book already.

The next auto-biography in my list was not a person unstuck in time. It followed, in fact, an absolutely standard approach of tracking the author's life from the beginning and moving methodically through every event in her life, in order. And that was the perfectly correct thing to do. The book is Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Again I actually listened to the audiobook, also read by the author. Some may find her accent difficult to parse at times, but it's worth it to get the authentic voice.

I had some vague impressions of Ayaan Hirsi Ali going into this...I knew she'd been in Dutch politics and had authored the short film "Submission, Part 1", which got the director, Theo van Gogh, killed in a grisly manner. Here is the film:

I knew that she had had to live in fear, and had eventually moved to the US. But I didn't know the half of it. Listening to the audiobook I got to immerse myself in Ayaan's entire life, from beginning to her "circumcision" to time of writing, and this is a case where knowing her life in this manner is crucial to understanding her journey through a primitive religious tyranny that should belong only to the dust heap of history, to her escape into the modern world and her flowering into an adult to become one of the most influential people of our times.

Through her sheer will and courage, she made the journey that her religion has not. Reading this book gives ample evidence of what it means for a religion to be taken literally, and any modern Western person can only be shocked to realize how much of the world is mired in ancient thinking. Ayaan makes a powerful case for the idea that fundamentalist Islam is not compatible with the modern world and cannot be tolerated in undiluted form. She puts it in our face that when we tolerant folk of the West talk about Islam as a "peaceful" religion perverted by a few bad apples, we know not of what we speak. Religions typically become peaceful through the process of reformation, and Islam has not had its reformation. And the followers of the unreformed strain of this religion are not few in number, and not interested in our Western ways even as they join our countries.

There is great danger as countries like Canada play with the concept of introducing Sharia law in an ill-fated attempt at tolerance; a danger that these ancient unreformed concepts could spread and touch us all. This may seem a stretch, but read this book and you will see how modern societies have succumbed in our lifetime, and you will get a sense of the vast number of women oppressed and subjected to the veil, and perhaps most importantly, you will see this what this meant to one very real individual, someone who could have easily been lost to us.

There are many more potential Ayaan Hirsi Ali's out there. Women who could be helping shape the world through their wisdom and intelligence. But they have not escaped, and live out their lives in a slavery from another time.