THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Prizing Anti-Americanism If you ran an American foundation with a whole lot of money—so much money that you give out each year what are, after the Nobel prize, the biggest...
...But men are stronger than women," I said...
...Pipes's assessment is that of a cold warrior: In the name of great good, communism brought great evil...
...He is a minor Palestinian poet, although he does command some genuine popularity...
...But the truth is exactly the reverse: The events of Sept...
...But Life at the Bottom is a valuable—and frightening— reminder of the destruction the welfare system wrought...
...Please, go buy The CEO of the Sofa...
...But what really makes P. J. O'Rourke untouchable is the pacing of his prose...
...Dalrymple quotes a teenaged girl who has taken up with a known abuser: "I can look after myself," said the seventeen-year-old...
...G.K...
...It begins with perfect timing for punchlines...
...His conclusion is straightforward: "The poor reap what the intellectual sows...
...In this book, women are hanged out windows by violent boyfriends, assaulted as they lie in hospital beds recovering from earlier assaults, and beaten by brutes...
...What makes all this possible is the British welfare state, which gives housing and money for nothing, discourages marriage, and affects a studied neutrality on the whole range of "lifestyle choices...
...Not only is there less patience today for poseurs and would-be firebrands like Edward Said...
...It failed because it was based on the false idea that man could be remade...
...Well, as it turns out, the answer is easy, at least for the flush Lannan Foundation of Sante Fe, New Mexico...
...11 have de--politicized things...
...Said insisted the rock was merely a "symbolic gesture of joy," while Columbia declared Said's actions were protected by "principles of academic freedom...
...Said and Darwish "just happened to be Palestinian and I guess that today that becomes an issue...
...Marxism-Leninism was first a theory, then a revolutionary program, then the brand name of certain political regimes in the twentieth century...
...The problem is not just that O'Rourke is funnier than the rest of us...
...So why don't certain authors come with warnings...
...On Oct...
...He is particularly good on the shades of difference among Marxist regimes...
...It's the way he's funny...
...He is a sort of politicized Rod McKuen for the PLO, best known for his ability to gather good-sized crowds to hear his rhythmic paeans to Palestine and denunciations of Israel...
...Justin Torres Too Funny for Words A year in the life of PJ...
...A girl who had absorbed nothing at school had nevertheless absorbed the shibboleths of political correctness in general and of feminism in particular...
...Like earlier manifestations of the age-old quest for perfect equality, it ran its course, and now the whole story can be told...
...Wodehouse is another...
...O'Rourke similarly creates the unfulfillable desire to write the way he does...
...11, the attention it deserved...
...The Standard Reader Prizing Anti-Americanism If you ran an American foundation with a whole lot of money—so much money that you give out each year what are, after the Nobel prize, the biggest monetary awards for literature in the world—on whom would you bestow your largesse for 2001...
...There's this indescribable speed that drags you from a description of his neighbors through an unbearably funny 6-page intermezzo about the presidential election, only to shoot you out into the deceptions that parents have to practice in order to convince their neighbors with bad political opinions to send their daughters over to babysit...
...Since the award began in 1989, only one prize has been given each year...
...Said and Darwish were chosen for reasons of politics—politics as it was perceived by the intellectual, literary, and prize-giving classes before Sept...
...There is also less patience for wealthy children who want to play with fire...
...It is our gain that so authoritative a historian as Pipes—a professor at Harvard for the last half century—has accomplished this feat of compression...
...But Dalrymple equally condemns the underclass for its refusal to accept common sense...
...O'Rourke BY J. BOTTUM There ought to be a law against people like The Weekly Standard's contributing editor IP J. O'Rourke, or at least serious investigation by the FDA, the FCC, the TVA, or whatever federal agency it is that regulates prose these days...
...and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born, which, as we know, is not the case," you can't stop yourself from trying—and failing—to recreate the perfect diction of that "as we know...
...The CEO's wife does so less frequently...
...Maybe it's the double initials, but PJ...
...His latest, The CEO of the Sofa, missed, in the wake of Sept...
...Not only is Said the first nonfiction writer to win the award, but the poet Robert Creeley had already been presented with the 2001 prize earlier this month...
...11 and, earlier, photographed in Lebanon throwing rocks across the border at an Israeli guardhouse...
...It's a hilarious walk through a year in the life of an author, loosely modeled on The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table...
...In more recent days, he has been quoted saying silly, anti-American things about the attacks on Sept...
...Said was an early exponent of the race-class-gender school of literary interpretation, famous once upon a time for such things as his denunciation of Jane Austen as a supporter of slavery and for Orientalism, his 1978 book raging against Western literature's presentation of the East...
...And what makes the welfare state possible—and here Dalrymple is at his most bracing—are the intellectuals who have overturned all the old wisdom about culture, sex, and criminality, creating a Hell that they do not have to live in...
...If you've wondered how your children and grandchildren are going to grasp this large and alien reality, a good move is to make sure they own this book...
...Laugh with it...
...When he says of Madeline Bassett, "She holds the view that the stars are God's daisy-chain...
...This would all be boringly familiar—if it weren't for the date...
...Indeed, the Lannan foundation— whose mission statement declares that globalization "threatens all cultures and ecosystems"—had to go very far out of its way to honor these anti-American authors...
...Yes," he finally remembers, "that made the Metro section of the New York Times...
...God knows, we need the laughter—as long as you don't have anything to write yourself...
...The world has changed for the rest of us...
...Thus, while the Soviet Union demanded outward conformity to the state, Mao's China pressed for inward conformity, while Ethiopia's military dictatorship merely "aped Soviet and Chinese practices for its own political ends...
...What happened on Sept...
...Do not read me when you have to write yourself" would work, or even, "Put me down, you idiot, you have a deadline in two hours...
...What makes the Lannan awards offensive is exactly what now makes those politics offensive...
...Claudia Winkler Theodore Dalrymple has written what may be the most depressing book ever: Life at the Bottom, a collection of his City Journal essays on the British poor...
...it has been transformed into a more dangerous and far more serious place...
...BOOKS IN BRIEF Richard Pipes calls this little volume both an introduction to communism and its obituary...
...Chesterton is this kind of writer...
...You can't read lines like "The Bible tells us to love our neighbors and also to love our enemies, probably because they are generally the same people" without having your own sentences break down into bad attempts at Chestertonian parallels and paradoxes...
...Dalrymple, a physician in a London hospital and prison, does not possess a soothing bedside manner...
...If the name of Mahmoud Darwish is less familiar, you needn't feel bad...
...11," he mourned, "has politicized everything...
...Dalrymple doesn't advance much in the way of solutions...
...The Lannan Foundation announced the prizes on October 28, six weeks after the murders at the Pentagon and World Trade Center...
...Patrick Lannan, speaking for his family's foundation, insisted that the winners were chosen well before the attacks...
...When he asks why he's the one who has to teach his best friend's son how to drive, his patient wife reminds him, "Nick's father tried to teach Nick's sister Ophelia to drive...
...When it comes to violence, they are at an advantage...
...Everything else has warning labels—my four-year-old daughter's nightgown had three of them, I noticed yesterday when she put it on backwards over her swimsuit and came downstairs to say she was leaving home to find nicer parents who would buy her a real mermaid...
...These prizes weren't given back in the days when it was still fun for the politically correct rich to tweak the noses of the bourgeoisie by toying with anti-Americanism...
...We wanted," a spokesman explained about Said, "to honor the integrity of his work, the rigor of his scholarship, the elegance of his prose, and his commitment to justice and freedom...
...That's a sexist thing to say," she replied...
...Read it...
...28, the foundation announced that it was granting a $200,000 "lifetime-achievement" prize to Edward Said, the Columbia University literary critic turned pro-Palestinian activist, and another $350,000 to Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian poet...
...Oliver Wendell Holmes has been agreeing with the CEO's opinions for nearly 150 years...
...So what makes it so important, all of a sudden, to present a second prize—to a nonfiction writer...
Vol. 7 • November 2001 • No. 9
