Oh but no. The American people will get their "If I Did It", courtesy of—wait for it—Ron Goldman's family, which seized the manuscript in a lawsuit. Some of the proceeds will go to the Ron Goldman Foundation for Justice, apparently. The rest, to the devil. 

I mean for God’s sake: they could have had a public ceremony and burned the thing. They could have kept it in a safe in a room in the basement. But no: the bullshit self-consuming therapeutic ethos that dominates so much contemporary fiction says: “the people must know”. For Ron’s sake. Because the truth—which, by the way, this isn’t—will set you (yes, You) free. Ah, closure. What dividends it pays to us poor among the living.

The idea that "exposing this confessional” to the rest of the world bravely—self-sacrificingly!— does justice to OJ's victims is so bogus it hurts. For starters, it is nothing the rest of America doesn’t already know, and know, and know. This is redundantly cruel, like a Shrek 3 with murder. 

 Anyhow, Timothy Noah has a multi-part review of the book’s actual merits:

 "Sit back, people," O.J. writes on the book's first page. "The things I know, and the things I believe, you can't even imagine."

"And I'm going to share them with you. Because the story you know, or think you know—that's not the story. Not even close. This is one story the whole world got wrong."

By even half-considering the book seriously, as, you know, literature, Noah manages to send several frissons equal parts anger, disgust, and fear down your spine.

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 …public outcry has encouraged others to come forward and protest abuse by the committee. The most prominent case has been that of a 50-year-old Riyadh woman who was kidnapped, along with her daughter, by two committee members who then crashed her car. As a result, three lawsuits have been lodged against the committee, which has never been legally challenged before.

Established as part of the pact between the religious establishment and the House of Saud, the mutawwa'in have symbolised the quid pro quo arrangement of Saudi Arabia – religious sanction in exchange for religious influence. Their special status has protected committee members from criticism and given them virtually unlimited power. Even as recently as 2003, the editor of a prominent Saudi newspaper was fired for daring to challenge the committee.

Yet in the past few weeks, outrage against the committee has burst forth from almost all corners of Saudi society. Editorials critical of the religious police have abounded, even in the historically censored Saudi press. A controversial online poll on the mutawwa'in, conducted by the Saudi-owned news outlet al-Arabiya, attracted the highest number of votes since the website was founded. Almost 35 per cent of respondents supported dismantling the committee.

As one Saudi blogger who runs a satirical site called the Religious Policeman [muttawa.blogspot.com] puts it: "They are the no-hopers, the social misfits, the failed imams . . . ugly in nature, ugly in behaviour." Indignation is so high that there have been physical attacks on the religious police, with 21 incidents reported last year.

Official critiques of the police have also been forthcoming. The National Society for Human Rights, officially sanctioned by the rulers, has taken the committee to task. A recent report by the group condemns various mutawwa'in practices, including "humiliating people during interrogation" and "beating people and using force to arrest suspects". Dr Muhammad al-Zalfa, a member of the advisory Shura Council, recently lashed out at the committee, saying: "Those who make mistakes must be punished, and we must lift the religious, political and social immunity off them."

…the outcry has clearly had an effect: the interior ministry recently published a directive pointedly reminding committee members to transfer suspects to the police, rather than holding them in detention centres. The committee has also hired a public spokesman for the first time and established a legal department to be known as the "Department of Rules and Regulations" – moves that illustrate the extent to which the committee has lost its infallible status…

 Five years ago, the mutawwa’in  prevented a group of schoolgirls from exiting a burning school in Mecca because they weren’t wearing the proper religious dress, a move which was defended by the House of Saud even after 15 of the girls were killed and 50 others injured. Catholic priests—there are 100, 000 Catholics in SA—have been arrested for saying mass. And in May of this year, a man was beaten to death for being suspected of having alcohol in his home.

Time reported this month that a campaign is sending text messages to a million Saudis to declare that “2007 is the year of liberation”. Without being there, it’s impossible to sense what’s prompting this change in SA—it’s more than just the internet and technology—but it’s worth tracking whether a refomation of the religious police will actually be realized, if , according to al-Watan columnist Khalid al-Ghanami, everyone will realize “that such practices, which did not bother many people in the past, are by no means acceptable today."

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Christopher Hitchens: “Of the suicide bombing population, 100% are faith-based.” (at 52 min)

"Wrong. Prior to 2003, the leading suicide bombing organization was the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lankda, a secular, Marxist-influenced separatist group."

 Robert Pape, the leading American scholar on suicide bombings, shows in an absurdly illuminating article that the origins of terrorism are not in Islamic fundamentalism but rather in firsthand experience of foreign—particularly US—occupation. He writes:

 “The evidence shows that the presence of American troops is clearly the pivotal factor driving suicide terrorism. If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal factor, then we should see some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world, like Iran, which has 70 million people—three times the population of Iraq and three times the population of Saudi Arabia—with some of the most active groups in suicide terrorism against the United States. However, there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Iran, and we have no evidence that there are any suicide terrorists in Iraq from Iran. Sudan is a country of 21 million people. Its government is extremely Islamic fundamentalist. The ideology of Sudan was so congenial to Osama bin Laden that he spent three years in Sudan in the 1990s. Yet there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Sudan. I have the first complete set of data on every al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world. Two thirds are from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990. Another point in this regard is Iraq itself. Before our invasion, Iraq never had a suicide-terrorist attack in its history. Never. Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004, and over 50 in just the first five months of 2005. Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled.”

Tim Lee at The American Scene adds:

"It’s fascinating how close the correlation is between the 9/11 hijackers and US deployments. 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, which hosted thousands of American troops at the time of the 9/11 attack. Two more were from the United Arab Emirates, which is currently host to about 1100 American troops. Another is from Egypt, which has 384 American troops as part of a peacekeeping force on the Sinai Peninsula, and also carried a Saudi passport. And the final hijacker was from Lebanon, a country that doesn’t currently have any American troops, but he was seven when Israel invaded Lebanon and eight at the time of the barracks bombing, two events that could easily have made a big impression on him.Among the hijackers there were no Iranians, Syrians, Sudanese, or residents of other countries where radical Islam flourish but the United States did not have a troop presence. No Iraqis either."

I hope that this will be the beginning of the end for all those that find comfort—and an excuse not to seriously confront the issue—in the generalization that Islam, the religion, is the source of today’s evils. It might be of use to novelists, too, who'll have to go beyond the Wikipedia page on Islam in order to create the believable psychology of a suicide bomber.  

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Damien Hirst, the obscenely rich and famous British artist, is more complicated. His diamond-encrusted platinum skull was sold today for US $ 10 million. If you’ve ever seen Hirst speak, or even read what he’s said, it’s clear that he’s a performance artist, that the man’s responses to the (eagerly awaited) criticisms of his art are as much a part of the art, more so, even, than the inanimate spectacles themselves. The art never stops, and Hirst is clearly calculating, if not always consciously. The fact that richer he gets the better an artist he becomes is, as far as I can tell, a new one for history. Worse, weirder, is that if you try to protest, you add to it. 

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Indeed, the first inklings of attention became viral, widespread anticipation for the upcoming translation of The Savage Detectives, which anticipation, now that TSD is in hardback on the front table of B & N, has been translated into a veritable orgy of Important attention (the Wood is behind Select). The hype at this point is almost too much (and you have to wonder at how free people feel to praise posthumously: Bolano died in ’03 at 50), so that I’m not even sure if I loved Bolano as much as I thought I did and I’m paralyzed into sort of saving The Savage Detectives like I saved Infinite Jest.

It’s merciless, and now the indecisive B. Kunkel of N+1 has a review in the London Review of Books. At first, it’s necessarily heavy on straight info that’ll be familiar to anybody who’s been trying to keep up, but the discussion of TSD, which I wish I had resisted reading, is, like the other reviews by Kunkel I've read, diverse, serious without being self-congratulatory, and occassionally unabashedly passionate (TSD "is something of a miracle" and "appallingly lifelike"). This cuts to the essence of RB:

 Bolaño’s desperado image is a large part of his appeal. His revolutionary politics and the personal risk they entailed, the movement he founded, his poverty, exile and addiction, his death in his prime: the combination of these elements is foreign to the increasingly professionalised career of the contemporary writer. Bolaño’s dishevelled, wandering characters are, more profoundly than they are left-wing, anti-bourgeois, which is to say disdainful of comfort, security and success: an attitude more than a politics, but the attitude is deeply felt. Even to write ‘marvellously well’, Bolaño declared, was not enough; ‘the quality of the writing’ depended on the author’s understanding ‘that literature is basically a dangerous calling’.

But Bolaño would not be so strange or significant a writer if he had not found a way of handling his dangerous calling with simultaneous reverence and irony. And ‘calling’ is the word: there is never any question in Bolaño of another vocation. He is a writer for whom what Nietzsche said about music would seem to go without saying about literature: without it, life would be a mistake. But there is also an important sense – as Bolaño demonstrates again and again – in which both he and his narrators are without literature, in the desolate way that a religious person might find himself without God. Part of this is simply that these stories and novels narrated almost exclusively by and about poets don’t contain (with one notable exception) any examples of the poets’ verse, and Bolaño often invites us to doubt how much a poet writes or how well. But it’s not just that his fiction about poets excludes their poetry; his fiction excludes many of the familiar components of fiction. Sponsored and sustained by devotion to literature, these books nevertheless abstain from what we think of as literary writing. In Bolaño’s fiction, it is as if – but only as if – literature were what he was writing about, but not what he was doing.

One thing I’ve been thinking about Bolano is the absence of any discussion of drugs or addiction in his writing, since he was a recovered heroin addict; if he were an American, you can bet he’d have at least one fictional memoir, and many more talk show apperances. Instead, though, you get the sense from his writing that literature really was a religion for Bolano, something for him to be saved by—what makes it so moving is not the strength of his conviction but the fact that as much as anything else he seems to be trying to convince himself by convincing us that he means what he's saying, that "a poet can endure anything". There is the former addict's tentative irony right there on the surface, actually. And there’s also this threat of indifference, a sort of menacing ominous placidness, in his character’s voices that I don’t think is the result of any sort of energy lost in translation (which, having read some of By Night in Spanish, are mind-bogglingly good). Enough–and get ready: the even bigger 2666 is on its way.

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 I wish I could say Bill O'Reilly was wrong about Paul Greengrass' Bourne Ultimatum being an anti-American film, but I saw it last weekend and O'Reilly's right. It's not just that the script plays on opposition to Bush anti-terror tactics–waterboarding, etc. Or that in a moment of calm hero Matt Damon utters maybe 15 of the 40 words he speaks in the film and explains that he's simply trying to apologize for … well, the CIA's sins, or maybe America's. Just because you oppose waterboarding and believe the U.S. has a lot to apologize for doesn't make you anti-American. The problem is the film is unredeemed by any sense that America or the American government ever stands for or does anything that is right. It is a big hit overseas. …

 The film also made me feel guilty, because I watched Greengrass' United 93 and left convinced it was a searing indictment of Bush's behavior in the hours after 9/11. (Air controllers spend much of the film trying to locate the AWOL President so they can obtain an order to shoot down the hijacked jet.) I didn't know anything about Greengrass, and the film looked like it had been based on actual records by a meticulously dispassionate observer. But Greengrass' Bourne film undermines his credibility and retrospectively dissolves United 93's anti-Bush power. I don't trust anything the man makes. … P.S.: Has Big Hollywood made a single non-anti-US post-9/11 film I missed? I can't remember one (aside from Team America: World Police, which was a self-mocking puppet cartoon).. … And don't say World Trade Center. That passed up several potentially epic patriotic moments (e.g. the Dave Karnes story) in favor of a soggy tribute to the fraternity of New York transit cops. … Next up: In the Valley of Elah, a well-made version of the Scott Beauchamp Story. … Is it the international market that makes our studios behave this way? I sense an underserved domestic niche. …

It being several days later, Christopher Orr has pretty much said what needed to be said in response to the “jingoistic nonsense” claims that the movie’s anti-American, here and here and here. I’d only add that at this point you’d think it was obvious that the conflation between the American government and institutions and America itself is something that should be deconstructed, not perpetrated, by Americans. The “this isn’t Us” line is clearly, and justifiably, anti-CIA, which really is the patriotic position to take. As Orr notes, the movie does put forward an alternate version of America, which is one in which Bourne the individual reclaims morality from bureaucracy—the fact that he only says 15 or 40 words is a nice alternative to shrill empty protest, too.

Also, I would hope that the international market pressures our studios to make self-critical films. World Trade Centert did try to be patriotic, and thought it was responding to American demand, but failed and failed boringly (bring on Any Given Sunday II, Stone!) finding out it wasn’t (so did Greengrass' United 93, I think, which, somewhat understandably, wasn't brave enough to tell any sort of made-up story, hiding in the robes of objectivity, instead). O’Reilly was, however, sort of right about his “impressionable audiences”: movies shape the sentiment as much as (probably more than) they reflect them, which is why 50 years later a movie like The House on 92nd Street, which I saw as part of the NYC Noir series at Film Forum a few weekends ago, has us laughing, and unusually loudly, where our parents seriously hooted and cheered. 

Oh and right: if you  love/hate America, read these. 

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Leave it to Jamie Kirchick, guest blogging for A. Sullivan, to dig beyond the headlines and continue to show compassion—even when many will argue it’s unwarranted— for Craig. It’s an almost Christian, unbearably wise, move on his part:

 In the fall of 1955, 12 men were arrested in Boise, Idaho for "infamous crimes against nature." Over a decade, it had been alleged, some of the city's most prominent men operated an underworld gay prostitution ring with hundreds of teenage boys. A story in Time, published after the scandal emerged, characterized the feelings of the day : "Boise, Idaho (pop. 50,000), the state capital, is usually thought of as a boisterous, rollicking he-man's town, and home of the rugged Westerner." How shocking, then, that there could be gay people living there. One of the more humane participants in this episode was the chief of the state's Department of Mental Health, who, rather than advocate that the men face jail time, offered that, "One alternative might be to let them form their own society and be left alone."

 There's a documentary film about this episode called "The Fall of '55."

 Initial claims that over a hundred boys were abused were exaggerated; only four or five boys were involved. But lives were ruined, gay men fled the city, and the sexual witch-hunt left a stamp on the state. Larry Craig is just one of the more public victims of the cultural atmosphere in this country that portrays homosexuality as disgusting and something of which to be ashamed. There are many, silent sufferers like him. You could see his shame in yesterday's press conference, and that the specter of Boise, 1955 has hung over Larry Craig all his life.

 Shit. Maybe he is human, after all. 

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Considering that these developments have clearly happened in anticipation of international attention, it’s clear that the Chinese government’s motivation is not to improve communication with foreign countries or ensure the health and comfort of Olympic athletes (forget its own people) but to pretty up its image—that is, sheer stubborn pride (which is why when it comes to iPhones, say, they'll giddily flout international patent laws).

Logically, then, this really ought to work. Why does it feel like wishful thinking? (And why is it semi-embarrassing to make obvious points, even when they’re right? The banality of talking about evil?)

As the Olympics approach, people with all sorts of beef with China will seize the opportunity, not just those concerned with the genocide in Darfur, but China’s support of the genocide in Darfur is the most important protest for Americans, athletes and spectators alike. That said, here’s hoping that Spielberg, Johnny Cheek, and anyone else who decides to protest resists the impulse to go all Live Earth on China—all they have to do, and, really, this is the most effective protest, is show up, shut up, and refuse to play along.

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