Music of the Day: Acoustic Alchemy, Radio Contact

One of the more faithful and steadfast readers (RB) of this blog sent me an e-mail not long ago, the subject of which was my use of the term "jihadist" in various postings here. The point of the e-mail was that when any of us use the term, we are playing into the hands of the Islamic propagandists because they "won't bother to translate the word into what Americans intend the word to mean!"

And for my further edification, he included two links to other internet sites so that I could find what is now apparently the preferred term (in some quarters at least)--hirabah, not jihad.

Jihad, according to Muslim extremists, is a "holy" war and when we use that term to describe the acts of murderous terrorist thugs, so the argument goes, we help confer upon them a kind of spiritual or religious legitimacy for those murderous acts, when real jihad, according to one source, is more of an intellectual effort to "promote peace through justice." Hirabah means, so far as I can tell, something along the lines of unholy war, or war against society, or war against civilization, or simply criminal activity. This term is supposed to name the murderous terrorist thugs for what they are--apostates and criminals.

My initial unease about the use of this term is that it seems to place acts of war into the realm of crime, which then perhaps means that we should deal with terrorist acts not as acts of war, and most especially not as acts of religious zealotry, but rather as merely criminal activities within Islam. Perhaps that further implies that we should be utilizing law enforcement personnel, followed by the solemn reading of rights, and the appearance of perfectly coiffed high-dollar defense lawyers orchestrating lengthy trials, and even more lengthy appeals, and special menus for the incarcerated, and eventually the obligatory insanity-defense gambit to avoid execution, and so forth--in other words, use of the term makes me, in my fevered state, fear a return to the Clinton-era law enforcement approach to acts of terrorism which was manifestly a failure and was, in my view, an abrogation of American security interests.

Clearly that isn't going to happen with captured terrorists in Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere, but the next terrorist event here in the United States may well lead not to the deaths of the terrorists, but to investigation and capture (as happened recently in Great Britain)--and all of the subsequent protracted and costly machinations noted in the previous paragraph.

What I'm afraid of here is a semantic game played by our enemies and their allies and the unwitting but well-meaning westerners engaged in parsing the linguistic nuances of the religious text of an alien belief system. If jihad isn't the most accurate or useful term, and if hirabah is, then by all means, let's replace jihad with hirabah. But if this latter term is a ride on the semantic bus to the land of nebulous and hazy obfuscations, let's not dither: Perhaps what needs to be done is to simply call murderous thugs exactly what they are--murderous thugs. If they think that blowing up children in a school is a legitimate act in a "holy" war, that says just about all we need to know about how they practice their religion.

And that means I must end this post with the last sentence in RB's e-mail message to me: "We'll prevail because we are a moral society; we just need to ensure it isn't lost in translation." Indeed.

Remember this, too--some wag once said that a lie circles the globe eight times before the truth can get its pants on. Indeed.

FINAL NOTE: There is an article in the Summer 2007 issue of the Claremont Review of Books entitled Winning the War of Ideas, by Robert R. Reilly, that is interesting and somewhat related to this topic. See the link to the right of this blog or, if that doesn't work (as it sometimes seems not to) get a subscription--it's only $20/ year.

AJ

Music of the Day: Mark Knopfler, Shangri-La

In a brief posting here a while back, I made reference to Mark Helprin's 2005 book Freddy and Fredericka: A Novel. I have some further comments to make now that I've finished the book and I have some brief comments to make about Cormac McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road.

Helprin's book was, as I reported, quite funny, although I must admit that nothing was funnier than the scene describing the Chinese nutritionist (who passed away from malnutrition) by the name of Pha-Kew, after whom Fredericka, the Princess of Wales, has named her 120 pound pit bull. The dog has a habit of escaping the royal grounds, at which time only Freddy, the Prince of Wales, can retrieve the animal by smearing gorgonzola cheese on his (Freddy's) face while roaming through darkened neighborhoods yelling Pha-Kew's name at the top of his lungs.

As I have mentioned here on more than one occasion, I am always undone by scatological humor, so it was easy for me to nearly choke to death after reading the section describing the Prince yelling "Pha-Kew" at full volume while running through an English village. This reminded me of an even more funny dog-chasing scene in an Anthony Burgess novel entitled The Doctor is Sick (a book published in 1960 and which I sadly suspect is no longer in print). The main character, Dr. Edwin Spindrift, is walking through the streets of London with the brothers Leo and Harry Stone and their dog N (if you get my drift). As the three men and the dog pass by one of the fuliginous denizens of the neighborhood, the man kicks at N, who runs away, with one of the Stone brothers chasing after, yelling his name, N, at full volume, which of course is a terrible mistake. This is one of many moments of bizarre but sweet humor in this book, which I think is the best thing Burgess wrote, better even than A Clockwork Orange. If you can find a copy of The Doctor is Sick, I suggest you read it after reading Freddy and Fredericka.

One further thing about Freddy and Fredericka--it is, all at the same time, a serious novel, a humorous novel, a flight of fancy (and maybe madness), and a collection of tall tales that will remind you somewhat of Twain and, if you've read any of his stuff, Edward Abbey (especially Desert Solitaire [1968] and Down the River [1982]). But Mark Helprin is, for the lack of a better term, a conservative writer, and I suspect he is also an Anglophile, and maybe he's even one of those curious people who still have a hankering for a good and true and noble royal who might lead us out of our current state of dis-civilization or un-civilization--but that's just a guess.

At one point in the story, Freddy is subjected to the rhymed pronouncements of a "team leader" at a jobs-center; he is described as "one part hysteric, One part Karl Marx, and one part Mother Goose." In response to the man's odd fulminations meant to motivate poor, jobless people to find work in order to grasp power, Freddy says the following:

"All you need do is refrain from smoking, drinking, and the use of drugs. Eat only wholesome, low-fat foods, with the emphasis on vegetables, grains, and fish. Seek work. Work hard. Show up on time. Do more than is expected. Think of ways to make the job efficient. Don't complain. Shave, bathe, and wear clean clothes. Be cheerful. Don't grumble. Live within your means. Save. And then, when you have all this in balance, study things of substance. Read to satisfy your curiosity. Don't father children out of wedlock or bear them as a single mother. Exercise. You will find that you will be promoted--perhaps not knighted, but promoted. If that doesn't happen, look quietly for a better position. Find a husband or wife whom you love and who has the same good habits. Invest. Assume a mortgage if you must. Teach your children the virtues. And then, having become the means of production, you will own your share of the means of production, and if you do these things, all of which are entirely within your power, you will own your lives."

It is, as you can now see, a serious novel.

Cormac McCarthy writes serious novels, too. His 2006 novel, The Road, is entirely serious--and dark, and foreboding, and heavy, and grim, and ultimately uplifting if almost entirely joyless. This is a post-apocalyptic novel with but two real characters, an un-named man and his un-named son. I won't write much more about the story here, preferring to let you read the book on your own; I will indicate that it was a slow week at the slaughterhouse, so I read this book in one day, just as I read his last book, No Country for Old Men, in a very short period of time (even Young Chris read this latter book in only one day). The man knows how to tell a story, even is he does not make use of conventional punctuation--sometimes, in longer sections of dialogue, it's hard to tell who is doing the talking, but with a little back-tracking, it's decipherable. I've read eight of McCarthy's books and I put this one right up there with The Blood Meridian and Suttree, which I think are his best works.

One final caveat, though--if you have trouble sleeping at night, don't read this book before going to bed; your sleep troubles will be exacerbated by troubled dreams.

AJ

Music of the Day: Grover Washington, Jr., Time Out of Mind.

Last evening my lovely bride finished a book that her sister recommended some weeks ago, the 2005 novel by Mark Helprin, Freddy and Fredericka. She laughed through much of the book, which is always a good sign, and this morning she handed me the book and said, "Read it."

As you know, I'm working my way through a couple of other books right now, the Brinkley/Reagan-thing and Bowman's book, Honor: A History, and as I noted here yesterday, my latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books arrived, etc., and so forth. Still, I took the book with me to the slaughterhouse, hoping to read a bit between eviscerations. What I didn't know was that I'd damn near die laughing in the first 80 pages. . . .

So even though I've not yet read 100 pages, I'm going to recommend it; Helprin's style is eminently readable, the characters are great, the plays on words are amazingly droll, and the plot (just now making itself evident) is intriguing. Enough for now; I've gotta' get back to the book!

AJ

Music of the Day: Alvin Youngblood Hart, Start With the Soul

We've had so many summer visitors this year (and technically it's only just now summer) that all schedules and plans have gone straight to hell. All, or most, of the visits have been good, with only an occasional unpleasantness, quickly forgotten or forgiven upon departure of the offending individual. Grudges do no good, forgiveness is the better thing, and if we can't keep those things in mind, wine salves the small wounds.

But all of this foot traffic in and out of the ranch means that reading schedules and commitments and plans for regular writing have been mostly abrogated in favor of company, travel, delectations and comestibles, tennis, shopping, and sight-seeing. In addition, staying in touch with things in the world has been nigh on impossible, hence the lack of any serious ramblings here in this space (if a blog qualifies as "space"). I haven't watched the news in a long time and yesterday I felt the need to switch on the TeeVee, briefly, to catch a smattering of some news broadcast. Mistake. . . .

I only caught about ten seconds of the loud man on Fox, the O'Reilly fellow, who was listening raptly to some attractive young woman as she talked about the "body language" of some politico during a Q&A session on some other TeeVee program; the attractive young woman was giving her assessment of the veracity of the speaker based upon. . .you guessed it. . .the speaker's body language--hand gestures, head movements, cheek-twitches, eye-tics, puckered sphincter (just kidding!) and such.

I thought this kind of mumbo-jumbo went out at the close of the 1970s, but apparently not; the loud O'Reilly fellow was, I think, feigning interest in all of the theories and suppositions based upon gesticulations and spasms, but nonetheless there he was, entertaining this stuff on his show, which he always declaims is number one in the cable news business. Number one. Body language. Fox News.

What's next, I asked myself--phrenology? I can just imagine Brit Hume listening to some expert in the "science" of phrenology talking about the bumps on Obama's head and what they mean--his strengths and vulnerabilities, his predilections, his soft spots (literally), his growth areas, and so forth. Maybe Chris Wallace will have someone on his Sunday morning show tossing chicken bones into the air and analyzing the arrangements brought about by gravity and giving us insights into Fred Thompson's future as a viable presidential candidate.

As noted in the previous entry, I held some hope that Fox might be the last place in TeeVee Land to provide some measure of believable news, but it is now clear that Fox too has given itself over to the Dark Side. This kind of insane, and inane, gabble I expected on MSNBC and ABC and CBS and, especially, the Today Show, but now the whiz-bangs at Fox have crossed the line--whereas I want news, they apparently insist on "entertaining" and presenting superstition as if it were fact. The closer we get to next year's election, the less of this stuff we need, but there seems to be no stopping the downhill slide towards November '08.

Hope was redeemed today with the arrival of this month's Claremont Review of Books, and in another week or so I can expect to receive my next issue of Commentary, and then shortly thereafter, my copy of Policy Review should arrive, so I'll be okay for a while--at least until I turn on the TeeVee again and see someone slaughtering a goat and reading its entrails to begin a discussion on House seats up for grabs.

AJ

Music of the Day: John Scofield, Hand Jive

My morning routine took me to Fox News, briefly, today--just to see if life might be normal or if the jihadist mad dogs had struck again here at home. Apparently, life is normal. Even Fox News has succumbed to the All Paris, All The Time theory of "news" broadcasting--sure enough, when I flipped on the tube and adjusted the rabbit ears to get the snow out of the picture, there she was (I think it was her--the helicopter was obviously at great altitude, so it was a long shot that was somewhat out of focus) being escorted to or from some jail in LA for some reason or other. Ack! More Paris news! Why oh why oh why. . . .

I hit the "mute" key on the gasoline-powered remote and waited for the next story; I guess the producers at Fox felt that Paris provided a natural segue for their next story, a lawsuit filed by two girls against the people who do the Girls Gone Wild videos. Apparently the two aggrieved girls are attempting to make the case that they only agreed to flash their boobies and/or butts if the film footage wasn't "released." Of course the whole point of Girls Gone Wild is to release the footage in the form of videos for sale; this bit of seemingly obvious information appears to have eluded these two girls who, the story goes, are now suing because of. . . .

I really should not have pulled the plug so violently from the wall because the whole damned socket and plate came out with the plug; the sparks resulted in a small fire in the living room, which I had to put out with water from the dog's dish and now Max the Wonder Dog isn't happy with me.

Honestly, I thought Fox News was, now and then, a haven of reason in a world of Journalists Gone Wild, but I guess I was wrong; but as I think about it for a few more seconds, I remember the nightly lineup at Fox, including the bombastic, rude, (and loud!) O'Reilly, the odd (synonyms: strange, abnormal, unusual, out of the ordinary, peculiar, anomalous, weird, funny) couple of Hannity and Colmes (the latter gent being only slightly less scary in appearance than the Congressman from the Planet Whackazoid, Dennis Kucinich), and Greta What's Her Name, who I think is still doing stories about the missing girl in Aruba and/or whichever celebrity is in legal trouble this week. No damned wonder the default setting on the TeeVee is the Military Channel.

Clearly it's time to change the morning routine and hit the books again before heading off to the slaughterhouse for the day's carnage. Not that I've been slacking in the reading department; I've finished re-reading Richard Mitchell's 1979 book Less Than Words Can Say, I'm now re-reading his 1981 book The Graves of Academe (both of which are available on the Underground Grammarian website--see list to the right of this blog), and I'm reading Douglas Brinkley's new book, The Reagan Diaries. I've also re-read P.J. O'Rourke's 1996 half-comic piece entitled The American Spectator's Enemies List, and I'm still (slowly) making my way through James Bowman's book Honor: A History. Add to that the occasional chapter in Paul Nitze's 1989 book From Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center of Decision--A Memoir, which dovetails nicely, now and then, with President Reagan's diaries. And, once in a while, just for giggles, I pick up a copy of Newsweek. . . .

AJ