Rockets and Rodeos
Mallon, Thomas
R eaders of TAS already know the work of Thomas Mallon; eight of the twelve pieces in this collection were originally published here. Ranging in length from four to forty-two pages, and in setting...
...The star turns out to be the hammy, merciful, and commonsensical judge...
...and the United Nations, which managed for years to avoid even discussing the Iran-Iraq war, but regularly bashes Israel in the Security Council, the General Assembly, and countless Committees...
...But Mallon generally avoids such easy targets...
...ambassador, deputy foreign minister, and principal spokesman during the Gulf War—that inspires such alarm among Arabs and Arabists alike...
...by the time he passes sentence he has grown on the reader in a way that is rare outside of fiction...
...This perception is reinforced by the media, whose focus on Israel borders on the obsessive...
...Helen can't act, and Ben can barely breathe...
...We have somehow been trapped in a seventy-two-minute Warhol film set in San Diego and possessed of what it thinks is a political consciousness...
...He is a spectator who notes the odd and telling details: that reporters at the U.N...
...More recently, State Department officials, according to Evans and Novak, have warned of "a potential tragedy" should Mr...
...The querulous, nitpicking prosecutor...
...Ranging in length from four to forty-two pages, and in setting from Florida to Alaska, they amount to an eclectic survey of our country in the last decade, from the viewpoint of a perspicacious and sympathetic American spectator...
...has failed in its aim to make the world safe, it can at least be credited with having done that for Turtle Bay...
...Especially after the Gulf War (at least 100,000 dead, and possibly many more), no fair-minded person can accept the pretense that the turbulent conflicts raging everywhere in the Middle East can be forced into the Palestinian straitjacket...
...The delusions and deceptions of others can exasperate this good-natured author, and they do on the campaign trail...
...His assessment of another movie (a "superb, repellent" treatment of the Leopold and Loeb thrill killing) is at once balanced and strongly felt, and he picks the director as "somebody to watch out for in every sense of the term...
...As Israel's advocate, he merits comparison with the brilliant Abba Eban...
...use manual typewriters (or did, as late as 1989), that Secret Service agents pay cash for their lunch aboard Air Force Two...
...Back then, I considered myself a Social Democrat and admired Israel's socialist economy...
...Perhaps it has something to do with his extraordinary effectiveness in presenting Israel's case to the world...
...The enemy," of course, being Israel, not Iraq...
...His account of a rocket •launching never takes off, weighed down not only by technical data 1 n 1985, the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai Al-Am called Benjamin Netanyahu "the enemy's most dangerous agent abroad...
...I met Benjamin Netanyahu while we were both students, nearly two decades ago...
...The courtroom piece is the longest in the book, but there are others that read more slowly...
...To secure Arab and Islamic loyalty to the Crown, Britain would have to repudiate the Balfour Declaration and...
...He also predicted that Israel's military victories would prove hollow if it didn't win the struggle for Western public opinion...
...Netanyahu—the newly elected leader of Israel's principal opposition party, the Likud—become prime minister...
...What is it about Benjamin Netanyahu—Israel's MIT-trained former U.N...
...He was right on both counts...
...Authorities have considered stopping the executions for environmental reasons...
...The production values have a willful, ascetic shoddiness: this is the kind of movie in which you can't make out the dialogue, but in which the movement of a piece of silverware is deafening...
...Mallon savors the ironies, and is more than merely amused by them...
...Netanyahu writes: There is something uncanny about the world's capacity to focus on the Arab-Israeli dispute (with total casualties estimated at 70,000 dead over five decades) in the face of the carnage of the other Middle Eastern conflicts, such as the Egyptian invasion of Yemen (250,000 dead), the Algerian civil war (1,000,000 dead), the Lebanese civil war (150,000 dead), the Libyan incursion into Chad (100,000 dead), the Sudanese civil war (at least 500,000 dead), and the Iran-Iraq war (over 1,000,000 dead...
...Mallon's description of a fair in Owosso, Michigan, evokes the poignant tensions of small-town life in the late twentieth century but suffers from a lack of focus...
...But already in the 1930s, British Arabists argued that Zionism was responsible for all their troubles in the Middle East...
...Netanyahu told me that Israel's Labor leaders were a bunch of economic illiterates whose "Bolshevist" policies were ruining his country...
...A long with his fairness and sense of detail, Mallon's kind disposition makes for characterizations that are humane and sometimes memorable...
...Fittingly, then, A Place Among Nations contains a stinging indictment of Israel's economic policies—both "Bolshevist" (Labor) and "Peronist" (Likud)—and describes Israel's failings at propaganda...
...This is the gentle lead-in to a disillusioning tour of the Old World Order's most grandiose symbol...
...Thankful for the security that diplomats have brought to his East Side New York neighborhood, he allows that "if the U.N...
...His review of an experimental movie is worthy of John Simon at his most vitriolic: This is the kind of movie that grips you by the eyelids and won't let go until you've fallen asleep...
...As for the scenery, one wishes the actors would chew it...
...The way tonight's speakers go on about the Pell Grants," he reports from Rhode Island, "one would almost think they were golden guineas extracted from the velvet bag of the senator's personalfortune...
...the polished, charming, angry activist of a defense lawyer...
...Of an animal-rights activist protesting a rodeo he quips: "one feels that if, as the song goes, he could talk to the animals, he'd bore them to death...
...But Mallon is hardly ever hostile, and when he is, it's not ugly but entertaining...
...After an execution in San Quentin's gas chamber, cyanide gas is let into the atmosphere and sulfuric acid into San Francisco Bay...
...But while Eban, who began his career in the mainstream of Israel's Labor Party, has moved steadily to the left over the past twenty years, the 43year-old Netanyahu—whose brother, Jonathan, was killed leading the 1976 Entebbe rescue mission—is a staunch partisan of the "Revisionist" right...
...Mallon's eye for this sort of thing can lead him into the realm of the absurd, for which he also has a taste...
...and the dreadlocked, Koran-toting defendant himself, who never says a word but laughs from time to time—all gradually emerge from a patient account of the inefficient proceedings...
...0 ne of the most enduring myths about the Middle East is that all the strife in that violent region is related to the Arab-Israeli dispute...
...Most enjoyable are the portraits of the principals at a Manhattan criminal trial...
Vol. 26 • July 1993 • No. 7
