THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Sontagged The first Susan Sontag Certificate— THE WEEKLY STANDARD's recognition of particular inanity by intellectuals and artists in the wake of the terrorist attacks—goes, of...
...The terrorist is "the American president's dark doppelganger...
...But for sheer outrageous-ness, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen topped her, calling the destruction of the World Trade Center "the greatest work of art imaginable...
...Hart energetically pursues central Western insights through Paul, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Molière, Voltaire, Dostoyevsky, and Fitzgerald, providing a dazzling cultural commentary along the way...
...I firmly believe," Walker concluded, "the only punishment that works is love...
...There was the willful obtuseness in moral reasoning: "courage (a morally neutral virtue...
...MICHAEL MOORE: The final category— using the occasion to indulge old political grievances—has innumerable contenders on both the left and the right...
...Boston, New York, D.c., and the planes' destination of california—these were places that voted against Bush...
...He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, . . . its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts...
...The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilized...
...While the dominant intellectual elites in the West continue to treat Castro indulgently as a socialist experimenter and entertaining critic of American capitalism, the testimony of Cubans like Valladares presents the horrifying reality...
...You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched into the afterlife in a single moment...
...The Standard Reader Sontagged The first Susan Sontag Certificate— THE WEEKLY STANDARD's recognition of particular inanity by intellectuals and artists in the wake of the terrorist attacks—goes, of course, to Susan Son-tag for her note in the Sept...
...But the top prize here goes to The Color Purple's Alice Walker, who wrote in the Village Voice that America should respond not with force but by lovingly lecturing Osama bin Laden...
...We regret our inability to attend...
...ALICE WALKER: Meanwhile, in the category of moral obtuseness, an honorable mention is claimed by Judith Rizzo, a deputy school chancellor in New York, who told the Washington Post: "Those people who said we don't need multicul-turalism, that it's too touchy-feely, a pox on them...
...She managed in only 460 words to score every possible point...
...Once Castro's tyranny falls, Valladares's work will be recognized as the classic of democratic faith that it is...
...In contrast to the regime's humanist rhetoric, Valladares lets us see a merciless police dictatorship that seeks brutal revenge on any who dare not to conform...
...Are there any good, nonviolent things he's done...
...For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way...
...Plato and the Prophets...
...When the New York Times said Roy's The God of Small Things was "Dickensian in its sharp-eyed observation of society and character," this is probably not what it had in mind...
...There was the moral equivaEditor's Note: With this issue, THE WEEKLY STANDARD begins a new feature: The Standard Reader, a section of commentary on books, arts, and ideas...
...Books in Brief Smiling through the Cultural Catastrophe by Jeffrey Hart (Yale University Press, 288 pp., $26.95) Who's smiling through the cultural catastrophe...
...There was the shtick of deliberately saying the outrageous: "If the word 'cowardly' is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others...
...The number of victims is colossal...
...Intellectual and spiritual martyrs who beckon to anyone in any age...
...In the British Guardian, she declared that osama bin Laden and George W Bush are actually the same person...
...Achilles and Moses...
...Bottum, Books & Arts editor lence, blaming both the attacked and the attackers: "How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq...
...Reviewing If Nights Could Talk: A Family Memoir for the Los Angeles Times, the poet Richard Howard wrote: "I must acknowledge an interest, or rather a dismay, in discussing this 'family memoir,' for from experience and observation I have come to regard the American nuclear family in the last 50 years as the enemy of individual determination, of personal autonomy— in short, as a disease...
...11, life goes on...
...Meanwhile, the publicity department at Prometheus Books has responded to the attacks with a list of helpful books it publishes...
...Perennial sources of social criticism...
...If you spot something about books or arts or academia that needs notice, send it to The Standard Reader, c/o The Weekly Standard, 1150 17th Street, NW, Suite 505, Washington, DC 20036, or to standardreader@weeklystandard.com...
...Why kill them...
...It's here you'll find notes about the literary, intellectual, and academic worlds—together with short reviews, reading lists, brief encomiums, and quick defenestrations, to say nothing of the cartoons of Nick Downes...
...We have to do more to teach habits of tolerance, knowledge, and awareness of other cultures...
...The press release's headline reads: "Books Offer Examination of Terrorism, Grief, Jihad, Air Safety, Evil, and Nostradamus...
...NOAM CHOMSKY: It seems almost unfair to include MIT's Noam Chomsky, the linguistics theorist turned far-left activist, for he fell off the cliff into goofi-ness thirty years ago...
...11 marked the first attack on the u.S...
...Secular and religious bronze-age heroes who set imperishable standards...
...After OpinionJournal.com publicized the posting, Moore removed it, claiming he'd been taken out of con-text—and replaced it with a paean to Barbara Lee, the single member of Congress to vote against giving the president war powers...
...Week after week, under restrictions of space, we found ourselves forced to ignore events, books, and intellectual items deserving mockery or praise...
...Socrates and Jesus...
...KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN: Sontag set a high standard...
...We had never before heard love described as a punishment, but about this kind of love she may well be right...
...Finally, we created this new section...
...Observing that Sept...
...Stephen Schwartz...
...But mention should be made of the syndicated cartoonist Ted Rall, who wrote, "Now we know why 7,000 people sacrificed their lives—so that we'd all forget how Bush stole a presidential election...
...mainland since 1812, he noted that in the years between, America has "annihilated the indigenous population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world...
...Send us your reading lists fit for the season, your clippings of absurd reviews, and your observations of lines in new books and shows that need mentioning...
...Hart cheerily explains the reasons the West's intellectual landmarks can be suppressed, ignored, subjected to racial, class, and gender distortions, and yet manage to reassert themselves again...
...Robert Royal Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag by Armando Valladares (Encounter, 260 pp., $16.95) Armando Valladares's account of his life in Castro's Cuba as a political prisoner and dissident author, now republished after 17 years, is a secret history of modern times...
...ARUNDHATI ROY: Matching Chomsky is the novelist Arundhati Roy...
...The Los Angeles Times is what used to be called a family newspaper...
...Well, you see, in book three of his prophesies . . . Finally, from Vienna: This month, the Kosmos Frauenraum will present five American women composers' works for trombone and computer...
...24 New Yorker...
...But "in scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's bombing of the Sudan...
...Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think...
...The day before, Abbie conant—the female first trombonist of the Munich Philharmonic—will lecture on "Symphony Orchestras and Artist-Prophets: Cultural Isomorphism and the Allocation of Power in Music," in which she promises to "document the gender and racial ideologies of the Vienna Philharmonic and analyze them from a historical perspective...
...Abandon all hopelessness ye who enter here...
...The terrorist attacks were major atrocities," he admitted...
...And there was the use of the occasion to indulge old political grievances: "We have a robotic president...
...What would happen to his cool armor if he could be reminded of all the good, nonviolent things he has done...
...By comparison, we composers are nothing...
...Dartmouth's Jeffrey Hart for one, and the great ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern writers along with him, he says...
...It's all part of the "Wired Goddess Project," an international effort to address the lack of feminist trombone-and-com-puter music...
...Cuba has existed outside rational history for more than forty years...
...But he has a fanatical readership among anti-globalization types, and he deserves recognition for a definitive formulation of moral equivalence—or rather, moral inequivalence, for America is much more to blame...
...When the uproar in Germany over his remarks caused cancellations of his concerts, Stockhausen apologized, saying he had meant only that the terrorists had created works of "the devil's art...
...She alone, Moore explained, "refused to run with the lemmings as they headed off to war...
...First place, however, belongs to filmmaker Michael Moore, director of Roger & Me, who wrote on his website, "If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who did not vote for him...
...Return to Normalcy Even after the events of Sept...
...Why don't you join us...
...I think they've learned their lesson...
...Nostradamus...
Vol. 7 • October 2001 • No. 5
