The Art of War
Don't get Washington Post culture critic Philip Kennicott wrong. He freely acknowledges that "virtually no one," including him, thinks the U.S. airstrike that killed Abu Musab al Zarqawi last Wednesday "was a bad thing."
But was it art?
Oddly enough, virtually no one else in the entire universe seems to have asked this crucial question. Nevertheless, Kennicott, in his June 9 "Images" column, has provided us the answer: From an aesthetic point of view, the bombing operation must ultimately be judged a failure--the specific problem being that the photograph of Zarqawi displayed at last Thursday's after-action press conference in Baghdad was "unsuitably framed."
Army staff semioticians, you see, chose to offer up the photo of the deceased terrorist's face "inside what appeared to be a professional photographic mat job . . . as if it were something one might preserve and hang on the wall next to other family portraits." Generally speaking, of course, frames serve "to bound an image, and close down its open edges; frames delimit, both physically and by extension, metaphorically."
But "in many traditions, a framed picture of the deceased suggests something like an icon, something to be venerated." And, sure enough, "photographs of journalists photographing the image at the news briefing showed Zarqawi's face looming above them. One might believe, for a moment, that they had gathered to bask in its exalted presence."
And one might also believe, for a moment, that Kennicott is being sincere about all this. But only for a moment. One quickly discovers, instead, that the frame per se isn't what's bugging Kennicott. What really fries his gizzard is that the people who made that frame obviously regard the framed man's death as an accomplishment.
"The framed image of a head," our critic fumes, "has a disturbing sense of the trophy to it--proof of another small victory brought home from battle." Imagine that.
American war victories? Always ugly.
Les Néocons
It was a few days after 9/11 and France was to observe three minutes' silence in solidarity with the United States and with our dead.
Florence Taubmann, pastor of L'Oratoire, a grand and historic Protestant church a stone's throw from the Louvre in Paris, had the church bells rung. Then she went outside to join the observance. Only there wasn't one.
People were going about their business, traffic was bearing down, horns blaring, as if nothing had happened, her husband, journalist Michel Taubmann, told the daily Libération. It was a moment that helped give birth to the "Cercle de l'Oratoire," an informal group of dissenters from the weird ideology now dominant among a French elite that hates America more than it hates Islamofascism.
Nearly five years later, the Taubmanns have gathered around them such intellectuals as the philosophers André Glucksmann and Pierre-André Taguieff, essayist Pascal Bruckner, Stéphane Courtois, a coauthor of The Black Book of Communism, and Kendal Nezan, president of the Kurdish Institute of Paris, as well as young writers and students. Notable figures like Bernard Kouchner, cofounder of Doctors Without Borders, and Nicolas Baverez, biographer of Raymond Aron and author of a much-discussed work on French decline, La France qui tombe, participate in its debates.
Most of the leading lights are neocons in the strict sense: former leftists who long ago rejected Stalin and Mao and the Gulag, yet who haven't found a home on the French right. Their new journal, Le Meilleur des mondes ("the best of worlds"), takes its title from that champion of reason and intellectual freedom, Voltaire.
"France is caught up in a kind of ideological madness," says Cercle member Jacques Tarnero, a filmmaker and writer. "The French have indulged a taste for radicalism ever since we cut off the king's head." In a world where beheading is once again a live issue, say Cercle members, true lovers of liberty can't afford to be wrong about who their enemies are and who their friends.
It's almost enough to restore our faith in la belle France.
Homelessness Update
In early 2001, we were convinced that with a Republican back in the White House, the media were bound to rediscover the "plight of the homeless"--which had been their favorite social problem until Bill Clinton came to Washington. (That was because they mistakenly ascribed the problem to Republican stinginess in the HUD budget, when in fact it had been caused by the civil-libertarian success in "deinstitutionalizing" the mentally ill.)
Happily, our cynicism proved unfounded for once. Even under Bush, homelessness has remained far from the headlines it dominated back in the 1980s. In fact, it's remained so far from the headlines that good news on this front has barely been reported. A reader sends this progress report delivered to a national summit of mayors, county executives, state officials, and community leaders who met in Denver May 10-12, under the aegis of the federal Interagency Council on Homelessness. This, from the ICH website:
* An 11.5 percent decline in homelessness in the Denver metro region, including a reduction in street homelessness from 1,000 to 600 persons since January 2005. * Just a few weeks ago New York City reported a modest, yet "remarkable," 13 percent reduction in street population. * A month ago, Dallas--the sixth largest city in our country--reported an overall decrease of a modest 3.3 percent, and a reduction in the chronic homeless population of 26 percent. * In Miami last month, Mayor Diaz reported in his State of the City address a 30 percent reduction in the street population. * In Portland, Oregon, the street numbers are down 20 percent, with 600 people experiencing chronic homelessness having been placed into permanent housing. * In Philadelphia over the last several years the numbers on the streets have fallen more than 50 percent. * In San Francisco a reported 28 percent decrease in homelessness.
"Why is this not news?" asks our correspondent. "Because it came out in a Republican administration?" Maybe our cynicism wasn't misplaced, after all.
African Art?
A piquant detail in the ongoing investigation of Rep. William "$90,000 in the freezer" Jefferson: According to a June 7 report by the New York Times's Philip Shenon, the FBI "raided the Maryland home of the vice president of Nigeria last summer in search of bribe money that the bureau believed had been paid to him" by Jefferson.
In the affidavit, an F.B.I. agent, Edward S. Cooper, said cellphone records suggested that Mr. Jefferson visited a home owned by Mr. Abubakar and his wife in Potomac, Md., an affluent suburb of Washington, around midnight last July 31 with the intention of delivering money to the Nigerian leader while he was on a visit to the United States. The next day, the F.B.I. said, Mr. Jefferson told a confidential informant that he had delivered "African art"--which the agent described as code for a cash payment.
We report; you deride.