Hit and Run (Day Four)

My turn again. Guess your jams and jellies are just going to have to wait, Maaz.

Word to the wise: all the world’s holy texts have some Get-Out-of-Jail-Free clause, which allows its users to commit the occasional murder. Okay, perhaps not Buddhist texts – though I’m cynic enough to believe that even their works have that clause encoded between the lines somewhere.

A lot of great links at 3 Quarks Daily today. Am wondering exactly what the “sort of Valentine’s card” the Islamic Republic of Iran sends Salman Rushdie every year. Are we talking a heart-shaped card with naked little cherubs brandishing AK-47s poking in every which direction, above an inscription which reads “Still thinking of you, sahib”? Am also wondering which is worse: an Iran headed by literal-minded clerics or clerics with a sense of humor like that; Thant Myint-U contributes an essay to the London Review of Books about a subject very dear to his heart (“What to Do about Burma”). Am just now getting into his book, The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), as it’s been recommended to me left and right; and Tariq Ramadan, the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine profile by Ian Buruma, offers “What the West Can Learn from Islam” for The Chronicle for Higher Education. It’s an embarrassment for this country to have revoked his work visa right before he was set to take up a professorship at the U of Notre Dame. It sends the message that the country is Islamophobic, and that’s a notion we ought not to be encouraging at this point in time.

One final thought: does Richard Dawkins strike you as the kind of guy who would get upset trying to explain to an uncomprehending child why Santa Claus doesn’t exist?

A post at Drezner’s site had me fuming for a few moments. That was “So How’s the Global War on Terror Going?”, which shows that the Center for American Progress, along with Foreign Policy magazine – not exactly a bastion of fiery left-wing propaganda – conducted a poll, asking respondents if they felt the world has become safer or more dangerous for the United States and its people. Survey says: 12% believe it has become safer, while 81% beg to differ. Was it the study that raised my temperature? Hardly. Below the YouTube clip of Caroline Wadhams of the CAP is a comment that seeks to cast aspersions on the whole study by pointing out that the CAP is, in fact, LEFT WING. Holy shit! What were those Foreign Policy idiots thinking even talking to those CAPpies?! That throws the whole enterprise into complete chaos! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!

At Crooked Timber, Scott McLemee reminds us, in “Boldly Uphold the Revolutionary Use of Stilted Language from ‘Peking Review’ Circa 1974!”, that English majors really have no place within Maoism. Dearest Fiona, how would you like to have received this message today? “Progressive And Revolutionary People Everywhere, Resolutely Uphold The Militant Bolshevik Spirit And Revolutionary Romanticism Embodied In Comrade Valentine!” Or “Decisively Smash Retrograde And Joyless Ultra-Left Lines Which Disparage Proletarian Love And Desire!!”

Is that the swelling of violins I hear? Well, Happy Valentine’s Day, my dear.

Actually, I remember back in my college days hearing some Communists speaking on campus in that very stilted speech, and not through a megaphone; so there really isn’t much room for parody here. They’ve already done a bang-up job for us.

Though I’ve grown quite fond of you within the oh-so-brief time we’ve been corresponding, Fiona, I must confess I’m also quite jealous of you. As you intimated in your last dispatch, you live in a city where you can run into writers and engage them in conversations about bloodshed. In Chicago, I’d be lucky if I might bump into a writer and get an “Excuse me” out of him/her – let alone a discussion on, say, Darfur. I’m thinking it’s got to be the weather.

Nothing much to say about The Elegant Variation today, except that it is required reading for the lit-minded. That, and if Floyd Landis wants to impress us with his honesty, he should hold off on the book and send us a urine sample. Now.

Finally: would have mentioned it before, but I didn’t want to blow my load in one post: excellent interview with John Waters at Nerve. Resolutely Uphold the Camp Aesthetic against the Incursions of Humorless Mullahs, Commies, Writers in a Hurry and Richard Dawkins Everywhere!!!

Love,

Helke

Happy VD, Helke. I once wrote a song called “Immaculate VD” for a friend of mine. “Immaculate VD is what she had, woke up one day predictably sad…” And so on. Awful stuff. But oh, the memories.

You know, I was thinking about the anniversary of the fatwa against Rushdie today. 3 Quarks didn’t even have to remind me. My love life is such that this is the sort of thing I associate with 2.14. Rushdie, on the other hand, has little to complain about in this department. Especially since Turkey is the new Iran when it comes to harassing or, I suppose, killing dissident writers, e.g. Ömer Asan, Elif Shafak, and Orhan Pamuk, who, Elegant Variation tells us, has immigrated to the U.S. To New York, in fact. Don’t you feel like there’s a neighborhood bar somewhere in this story? If your country wants to kill you, dollar beers at the Beekman Arms.

Apropos Dawkins on 3 Quarks, I wonder what he’d say about this Dr. Ross fellow who, according to the NYT, is a “young earth creationist” cum paleontologist who dates the earth back 10, 000 years or 65 million, depending on which hat he’s wearing. I cannot understand this at all. The man’s a scientist working with fossils and data who somehow disbelieves the material he works with all day? Dawkins would probably call him a fool. Have you ever seen the Atheism Tapes? A bunch of interviews with renown atheists, Dawkins and Arthur Miller, among them, conducted by the somewhat windy but always fascinating Jonathan Miller? I recommend them, if they slipped your radar.

As for Drezner and the Center for American Progress’s poll, what do you expect? No conservative wants to hear that even his campadres are jumping ship. I checked the list of participants and while I didn’t recognize a lot of the names—besides Drezner, of course—I did notice the bit where the CAP asked the participants to characterize their bias. I can only assume the self-proclaimed conservatives are actual conservatives, not liberals hellbent on infiltrating the CAP’s poll. On a side note, didn’t that graphic of the poll results seem sort of fancy for Drezner? Ugliest site ever, but nice graph!

On Crooked Timber—these people are really starting to scare me. Why do they all know so much about the American Maoist Movement? And why do I know so little? I went to school with one of the Weathermen and I still know less than these people. What the hell is the Klonskyite CP(M-L)? The farther along I got in the comments, the more my eyes glazed over. I feel like this is a self-indictment, though I am trying hard to make it their fault.

Thank God for the Scanner! I’m not reading Nerve for the content—sorry, Waters—I’m just in it for the laughs. That period lesbian song from Buffy they featured today? Hilarious. She levitates. She cums. She cums under a “Willow” tree. Stop reading the main pages, Helke, and just go to the Scanner.

She went to parties, but grief accrued Immaculate VD is solitude.

G’night.

f.

To see Day One of Michael and Fiona's Movable Snipe, click here. To see the next round of letters, click here.

To see our first installment of Movable Snipe, featuring Spencer Ackerman and Melissa Lafsky, click here.

Fiona Maazel has previously written for Jewcy on why unhappiness is the key to happiness. She also participated in a piety contest with both the U.S. and Iranian presidents in our "Letters to Ahmadinejad" series.