One-Way Street

Three Strikes

At the height of our sweaty summer, a few commentators began to venture the thesis that the United States has lost the war in Iraq. Writing in the New Yorker Hendrik Hertzberg recently concluded that we've rolled "snake eyes" in the big Iraq gamble. Most famously, Thomas Friedman, in uncharacteristically caustic tones, finally gave up on the Iraq war, calling for a few face-saving measures before we pull out the troops.

Going into the fall, the question seems to be: are we winning, or have we already lost? The first issue we need to address, as John Lehman points out in an op-ed piece tellingly entitled "We're Not Winning This War," is determining which war we're talking about. He writes, "The Bush administration continues to muddle a national understanding of the conflict we are in by calling it the "war on terror," then countering, "This not a war against terror any more than World War II was a war against kamikazes." This is a standard complaint, but this time it's coming from the Secretary of the Navy under Reagan and a member of the 9/11 Commission. Lehman can't be shrugged off as an appeaser.

Lehman shows his conservative loyalty by giving the Bush administration a few kudos: "The Bush administration deserves much credit for the fact that, despite determined efforts to carry them out, there have been no successful Islamist attacks within the United States since Sept. 11, 2001." This is a highly debatable conclusion--no one can say for sure why we haven't been attacked--and the 9/11 Commission's report card gives the Bush administration dismal grades on most subjects, including and especially securing our ports and chemical plants.

However, Lehman goes on to say that we're losing the war on all three fronts:  the home front, the operational front and the strategic-political front. Despite Rumsfeld's assurance to the contrary, "our ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating." Threats are pressing on from everywhere; Iran is laughing at us, North Korea celebrates the Fourth of July by shooting off missiles, and China is building up its navy to fill in the gap left by our declining naval power in the Pacific.

In coolly dispassionate tones, Lehman concludes, "In reviewing progress on the three fronts of this war, even the most sanguine optimist cannot yet conclude that we are winning or that we can win without some significant changes of policy." This is a telling closing statement, since changing policy in regard to the war on terror and the war in Iraq is not something we can expect from this administration.

On the home front--the only front that any of us really care about--we will appear to be winning the war against the Islamic fanatics until one awful day we suddenly won't be.

Naguib Mahfouz

I was just starting graduate school in the 1980's and first poking around the world for authors outside the Anglo-American canon of my high school education, I was told that there was no tradition of the novel in Arabic. Middle Eastern literature, I was taught, was dominated by peculiar forms of ceremonial poetry. On those occasions when Arabs wrote novels, they limited themselves to romances. The message: there's nothing of interest here. Move on. And so I did--most notably to the Latin Americans, who had a similar literary history.

Then Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in 1988. Suddenly, a whole new space opened up for the world novel. He was a sort of one-man Boom. Mahfouz was an unlikely combination of a militant moderate and a chronicler of elegant old Cairo, a world that preceded him in death. Among Mahfouz's successors is Alaa Al Aswany, whose terrific The Yacoubian Building has just been translated into English.

What's an Islamic Fascist?

Two of the world's foremost megalomaniacs spouted off today, demonstrating yet again that no debate about the Middle East is entirely free of at least a tinge of madness. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad challenged George Bush to a televised debate on Iran's nuclear program. Ahmadinejad wondered aloud, "Isn't it time that international relations are founded on democracy and equal rights of the nations?" The White House, resisting snark, declined the invitation as a "diversion."

Then Donald Rumsfeld, displaying the venal rhetoric for which he's so famous, inveighed against critics of the Iraq war, which would be most of the American electorate, as suffering from "moral and intellectual confusion" in the fight against "Islmic fascism." He likened the calls for US troops to leave before the entire country blows up in a frenzy of revenge killings to the appeasement of Hitler.

Rumsfeld's remarks got me to thinking: What is an Islamic fascist, anyway? It's a term that gets thrown around a lot lately, but what does it mean? Is Ahmadinejad a fascist? Are the hapless Miami 7 who supposedly wanted to blow up the Sears Tower fascists? How are the forces arrayed against the US in the Middle East fascist in any meaningful and unified sense? It seems that "Islamic fascist" is one of those emotive terms designed to place artificial limits on debate before it even begins.

Architecture Firm for Sale Cheap

Want to buy an architecture firm? Graham Anderson Probst & White, the firm founded by Daniel ("Make no small plans") Burnham, is for sale. The firm is responsible for landmarks such as the Wrigley Building, the Shedd Aquarium, the Merchandise Mart (where I work, deep in its bowels), the Civic Opera, the Post Office building and the Union Stations of both Chicago and Washington, DC. When the firm was at its peak in the Teens and Twenties, it was known for reinterpreting neo-classical and European design motifs in the American idiom, which in that optimistic time, was a sort of high capitalist heroism. Once employing over 200 architects and designers, it's now down to seven lonely souls. The lead partner is leaving to become the house architect of a pizza restaurant. Graham Anderson Probst & White can be yours for less than $1 million.

Jazz Showcase Shown the Door

Chicago's venerable Jazz Showcase, the second oldest continually operating jazz club in the United States after the Village Vanguard, has lost its lease at 59 W. Grand Avenue. Owner and founder Joe Segal says he doesn't know where he's going to move, but he hinted that he might set up shop again in the South Loop area.

Another Da Vinci Code

Now that The Da Vinci Code has finally disappeared from The New York Times bestseller list, where it's been since, it seems, 1985, it's time to speculate on what the next Dan Brown novel might look like. How about this as an opening scene: an Italian art historian discovers a lost Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. But the historian is found murdered, his body impaled on the scaffolding just as he's about to reveal a part of the painting that gives a clue to a vast conspiracy involving the Vatican, the Masons and Mercedes-Benz to cover up the pope's past membership in the Waffen SS, during which he secretly married an Austrian woman and fathered Arnold Schwarzenegger. The historian's impaled body points to a square-jawed figure in the Leonardo painting wearing a black leather jacket, dark sunglasses, and holding an enormous, futuristic-looking gun . . .

This scene isn't so far fetched. An actual Italian art historian, Maurizio Seracini, is convinced there's a lost Leonardo painting under another painting in the Palazzo Vecchio. If Seracini sounds like a character in a Dan Brown novel, it's because he is: he appeared in The Da Vinci Code. He claims to know where Leonardo's The Battle of Anghiari is located by a clue in the fresco by Giorgio Vasari (above), which supposedly covers the Leonardo. The clue lies in a solder's cloak inscribed with the motto Cerca Trova, or "He who searches shall find." According to Seracini, The Battle of Anghiari is the lost masterpiece of the Renaissance, greater than any other work by Leonardo or anyone else during the period. Stay tuned--for the painting or the Dan Brown novel, or both. But Brown will have to come up with another murder victim, because it would be impolite to kill off a character based on a living person.

Good Riddance, Pluto

I'm a liberal on most issues, but I'm a conservative--no, more than conservative, I'm a neocon!--in solar system matters. In the indecision and deviousness typical of world organizations, Pluto's place in the planetary club was reaffirmed just a few weeks ago, which meant all kinds of  interplanetary riffraff qualified as planets, too. But reason has prevailed. Pluto is out. Well, good riddance. We had too many planets, anyway.

Pluto's pathetic attempt to sway public opinion doesn't move me. We must remember that Pluto is god of the dead and the ruler of the underworld. To think we've been teaching our children that the planet of death is equal to Venus, which is part of the culture of life! We should only have life-affirming planetary bodies.

And now Pluto is making terroristic threats  (see above left, to be found at Worth1000). I'm outraged that NASA continues to underestimate the threat from iceballs on the margins of the solar system that hate our freedom and our cozy proximity to the sun.

La Bella Figura

Earlier this summer when I was in Rome I concocted a scheme by which I could move to Italy and make a living selling tee shirts that said, "I survived crossing a street in Rome." Then I calculated the benefits of living an Italian lifestyle (great food, friendly people, naps in the middle of the day) with the costs of daily life in Italy (trains that may, or may not, let you out at your stop) and decided to return to the US. Beppe Severgnini, a Milanese journalist, explains the paradoxes of Italian life in his new book, La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind. Severgnini's argument is that Italy prefers beauty to, say, a functioning judicial system. Indeed, as anyone who ventures beyond the standard tourist circuit can see, for all its enchantments and G8 membership, Italy is a bit Third-Worldy around the edges. Severgnini documents the frustrations and joys of la vita Italiana in a series of vignettes ranging from the cliched (Italians' casual attitudes about stop lights) and the insightful (the strengths and weaknesses of Italian flight attendants). He can be glib, but he's a (mostly) clear-eyed observer of his wonderful, exasperating country.

Homes and Their Relation to the Unconscious

Alain de Botton's London home is profiled in the Money section of the Independent. (Would Socrates allow his home to be profiled in the financial section of a paper? Would Nietzsche? I think not.) It's a mild form of voyeurism, but I have a weakness for these home profiles, especially if you see interior spaces as representations of someone's inner self. The New York Times runs an occasional series on them in the Sunday magazine. The most recent profile was on Jacques Pepin, whose Connecticut house was revealing: lots of pots and pans hanging on the wall in the kitchen, and antacid medicine on his bedside table for the three (!) bottles of wine he and his wife consume every evening.

De Botton's 1890's townhouse sounds tranquil to the point of blandness, although it's amusing to imagine how his fussy minimalism has been demolished by his two-year-old son--an experience I can certainly relate to. There's a lot to disagree with in de Botton's work, but I can't quarrel with his assertion that having the complete works of Freud on hand is a necessity.

Double Indemnity

Dave Kehr discusses the reissue of Billy Wilder's corrosive Double Indemnity, perhaps the bleakest American film ever made. There are no admirable characters in the film, certainly not the scheming couple (a wicked Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, cast against type), nor, arguably, the insurance company detective played by Edward G. Robinson, a terse, sour company dick who seems oddly gratified that the murder plot has taken place with such malice. Double Indemnity, along with The Big Sleep and Mildred Pierce, are the three great early noir films.