The politics of political violence

In 2008, I participated in a discussion group organized by the New York Public Library, such as the Violence and the Left. The panelists were not conservatives complaining about left-wing violence on college campuses or the left’s long-standing habit of making excuses for practitioners of political violence, from Joseph Stalin to Pol Pot. Rather, the panelists were two leftists, French literary scholar Bernard-Henri Lévy and Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek. It was a slightly more innocent time (strange to write!), but Žižek is relatively outspoken about the legitimacy of political violence against the right kind of people, i.e. I was a little surprised when I heard that. Of course, while more or less agreeing with Slavoj Žižek’s opinion, he maintained reservations about its strategic value. In the audience, Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali sat next to each other, listening to a reasonably safe and well-considered academic theory about the moral imperative of violence. “That’s where the bomb is going to go off,” I thought. In this case, it wasn’t the bomb explosion that Rushdie endured, nor was it that night. It was a knife attack that occurred at Chautauqua Research Institute in August 2022.

(The Chautauqua Institute keeps a guest book signed by all the speakers it invites. The next name after Salman Rushdie is Jonah Goldberg.)

Rushdie Fatwa has been part of the intellectual background of my life since I was a child. I was a sophomore in high school when Khomeini’s death sentence was first broadcast on Tehran radio. In 2014, Mr. Rushdie spoke about sectarian violence in the city he still calls “Bombay” and knows as “Mumbai” to much of the world, saying his security strategy “is “It will lead to a normal state.” Years after the fatwa, when he first began performing after being forced to take unusual security measures, Rushdie was expected to perform in large-scale security shows with dogs and ponies; It was said that it was unpleasant. But nothing happened… nothing happened. “Boredom is very effective,” he said.

But one day, that wasn’t the case.

Rushdie is one of the rarest kinds of celebrities, and his work is not overrated. If you haven’t read The Devil’s Verses, Midnight’s Children, Moore’s Last Sigh, East, West, or any of the lesser-known novels, please invest your time. The section on India is worth your time to read, not only for literary but also political reasons. Something worth knowing about India. (Since I’m talking about Jonah Goldberg, his account of his recent trip to India is worth your time.) There’s a lot to learn from fiction. A million years ago, I was working on a project for a corporate security company in the Dominican Republic, and I knew absolutely nothing about DR, so I asked my boss, who knows a lot, to read my recommendations. He told me to read Mario Vargas Llosa’s great novel, The Feast of the Goats, about life under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. It is not a history book, a political science work, or a series of policy essays, but a novel. It was a good recommendation.

The Ayatollahs are in a tailspin right now, but Salman Rushdie is still working. He is 77 years old and lost an eye and hand after the knife attack, but there is a good chance he will outlive the Iranian dictatorship that wants him dead. Inshallah.

The worst kinds of oppressive governments hate writers. Poets and storytellers act first. Federico García Lorca must disappear, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn must be expelled after he is released from the concentration camp.

And while we all enjoy abusing lawyers, especially me, ambitious tyrants must also get rid of them. Lawyers are people who do the actual work involved in realizing the rule of law. In the late 1930s, the Soviet Union shot and killed about 160 counterrevolutionary lawyers. And the more the situation changes… President Vladimir Putin cannot have Olga Mikhailova in all of Russia. Or Ivan Pavlov. Alexei Navalny must be killed.

And if you’re making a list of enemies that Kash Patel should have on hand after Donald Trump installs you as FBI director, then of course you should blackmail my colleague Sarah Isgar. I’ll probably put it on the list. And all the lawyers who worked with Sarah Isgur and others who weren’t on the blacklist, what were they doing? There are many things I envy about Sarah, but that might be at the top of the list. So I feel like I’m a little lazy myself. I am reminded of the sheriff in No Country for Old Men meditating on his duty to work for justice. It is spelled out in the department’s handbook as follows: Something like that. I am going to start giving of myself twice a day. ” If you don’t blacklist someone, you’ll feel like you’re missing something.

“It’s time for a choice,” said the famous speech. It’s always like that.

I was thinking about Bernard-Henri Lévy in the less serious context of fashion. His trademark stand-up collar and shirt unbuttoned to the sternum are exactly what a French intellectual should look like, a look not every 76-year-old can pull off. Sometimes you see Joe Biden walking around with a few buttons of his shirt undone, but he doesn’t look dashing, more like a drunk salesman after happy hour. Of course, Biden has a special look. The remains of an aviator indoors, an unbuttoned shirt, and a senator’s unkempt hair in need of grooming.

The average person who wants to look a certain way has to be intentional about it. And then a recent photo of Bernard Henri Lévy caught my attention. Because if you look closely, you’ll see that it’s not entirely true that he has his shirt unbuttoned halfway to his belly button. His shirt was custom-made for him by the kind folks at Charbet (French public intellectuals are different from American intellectuals!), and that custom-made shirt included the There are no buttons or buttonholes above the position where it usually stops. I don’t know if I stand by that look exactly, but I stand by the commitment to having things your way when you can.

Donald Trump looks like a uniform. He typically wears off-the-rack Brioni suits (starting at about $7,000) and thumbs his nose at custom-made suits, insisting they’re only for people with “odd body types.” Trump has a talent for making expensive things look cheap, like his suits, his house, and his wife. If I were Brioni’s owner, I would literally offer him tons of money to stop wearing suits. Trump has at least improved his ties lately. He was a large man who insisted on tying his necktie all the way to his scrotum, so that it was often too high for his tail to squeeze into the small loop at the back. President Trump was also photographed with his necktie secured with cellophane tape, an embarrassing appearance for such a prominent figure. He seems to have recently purchased a very long one made by Italo Ferretti, which is currently promoting its “Presidential Collection.” Either J.D. Vance has started wearing the exact same suits and ties as Trump, or he’s found someone who fits them almost perfectly — who can wear armbands and jackboots when you can have a stupid red hat and a stupid red tie? would you need? A uniform is a uniform. Even if it’s not very good.

I feel a little bit of President Trump’s pain. I once heard a man describe himself as the kind of guy who could wear a Marine uniform and 15 minutes later look like he was wearing pajamas. I got married in a Brioni suit (I didn’t pay $70,000 for that suit; you’d be surprised what you can find at Saks Off Fifth in Dallas), and I had it very carefully tailored. I got it and I don’t know if it will last forever but it looked pretty right. Emmanuel Macron wore expensive clothes when he was making a fortune at Rothschild & Sea Bank, but after entering politics he wore expensive clothes at Jonas & Sea (think French version of Men’s Wearhouse). He famously started wearing cheap suits (please note) and looked great in them. of course. A good relationship helps, but the important thing is that he is very healthy. Having the right physique can make many things look beautiful. Some of us may remember Sharon Stone showing up to the Oscars wearing a Gap turtleneck. She looked just like…Sharon Stone.

Sometimes you have to dress down. Barack Obama is a watch lover and likes Rolex, but as president he wore an inexpensive watch. I think part of the reason for that is because he’s a Democrat, and part of it is that there are certain ugly cultural values ​​attached to the president. A black man wearing a Rolex that I wanted nothing to do with. He wears a better suit now. Bill Clinton wore that stupid Timex Iron Man with his badly cut suits as president, and in the first few years of his retirement he bought over $1 million worth of luxury watches. Until he married Melania Trump, he wore watches like you’d expect, but Melania seems to have pushed him in the direction of Vacheron Constantin, if he had the means. This is a very good direction. Mitt Romney is one of those rich people who seems indifferent to the luxuries of the normal rich. He may be a Mormon, but he adheres to the old WASP ideal of appearing completely unremarkable, at least when it comes to dress and grooming. .

We have several years of solid red bonds ahead of us. I hope someone tells Donald Trump about Cinnabre’s custom tie service. That and rejecting most of his cabinet nominees would be a big boon for him. Please help him.

Some readers have complained about this use of the Oxford comma. Does this mean parentheses or series?

Yes, I think Donald Trump is a clear underdog, and I think voters in November would have chosen Kamala Harris, a crazy hippo or an egg salad sandwich, over Trump.

I don’t think I’ve given readers much reason to describe Kamala Harris as a “crazy hippo.” As Jay Nordlinger, Théophile Gauthier, and TS Elliott tell us, hippos are magnificent creatures: noble, powerful, and indomitable. Do you know what the natural enemies of hippos are? Lions who haven’t learned their lesson yet. When a hippo decides on something, the hippo wants it, and the hippo gets it.

Kamala Harris doesn’t look like a hippo in any way.

I think if they had put an egg salad sandwich in front of the crazy hippo, this series would have been easier to read for the uncharitable. Because you don’t usually see “egg salad sandwich” used as an insult… except when you’re reading me. But I really felt the egg salad sandwich was a natural climax. Use the deranged hippo to construct sentences (and the desired inflation is why I wrote “hippo” instead of “hippo”; it works better that way). Then deflate it with the mediocrity of the sandwich.

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I don’t mean to be too picky, but Christmas with four babies in the house is so much better than Christmas without four babies in the house. I’ll have more to say as the big day approaches.