The Newsstand Sophisticate

A German zoo used a trompe l’oeil dog costume to attract people to the zoo as part of its menacing “Come to the Zoo before the Zoo comes to you” campaign. Scroll down for the pictures.

A very close friend of my family, Patricia Walkup, died on June 9 of last year. She spent much of her last 15 years or so as an activist for improving her San Francisco neighborhood, Hayes Valley. Her (and her neighborhood’s) great triumph was the defeat of a plan to rebuild a Loma Prieta earthquake-damaged freeway overpass through Hayes Valley and instead create a beautiful, tree-lined street, Octavia Boulevard.

Patricia was one of the funniest, most joyful, and most irreverent people I’ve ever met, far from the stereotype of the tireless activist. Her activism was rooted in the simple idea that people should enjoy living in their neighborhood, as she did. I remember her giving my father and me an evening tour of her neighborhood once while assorted ruffians argued over drugs and broke 40-ounce malt liquor bottles in a nearby parking lot. Even then, she knew she could make her new home a better place as I wondered nervously if I would make it out alive.

Sometimes her efforts meant offending San Francisco leftists by demanding that police enforce laws against prostitution and drug use more vigorously. Sometimes it meant frustrating conservatives (or what passes for conservatives in San Francisco) by refusing to sacrifice the liveability of the neighborhood for the alleged economic benefits of a freeway overpass. She was happy to do both and as a result Hayes Valley is a much more enjoyable place to live now than it was when I first visited her in the late 1980s when she bought an apartment there.

Patricia’s brother, Lee, has commemorated his sister’s memory by moving a beautiful 1884 concert grand piano to the Cadillac Hotel, a non-profit single-room occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin where Patricia did volunteer work. You can read about it here. You can also watch local television news coverage (complete with corny news anchors) here.

Rest in peace, Patricia.

Christopher Hitchens has written an article in Slate on the semi-pro members of the “Muslim street” who keep Karachi’s flag shops in business with their regular protests against any and all perceived insults to Islam from the West. Anger over Salman Rushdie’s knighthood is only the latest casus jihadi. Hitchens once again rightly chastises Western media producers for setting up people like “Rage Boy” as the true representatives of the Muslim world:

But our media regularly make the assumption that the book burners and fanatics really do represent the majority, and that assumption has by no means been tested. (If it is ever tested, and it turns out to be true, then can we hear a bit less about how one of the world’s largest religions mustn’t be confused with its lunatic fringe?)

I love Youtube. Here’s the Sir Douglas Quintet on “Hullabaloo,” in 1965:

By far the best garage conjunto Liverpudlian impersonators ever to come out of San Antonio. And the set design (and girl in armor!) for the performance is fantastic.

Christopher Hitchens lays the smackdown on Baroness Shirley Williams on British television program “Question Time” after she regrets the knighting of Salman Rushdie, a man who, in her words, “deeply offended Muslims in a very powerful way.” Some of the audience is also on the receiving end of the smackdown as well for applauding her “contemptible” statement:

One of the oddest things about Western leftists defending illiberal but non-Western groups and movements is that though they are obsessed with diversity and dissent within the U.S. and U.K., they absolutely ignore diversity and dissent that exists within countries like Iran or in the Palestinian territories. Why are Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hamas taken to be legitimate spokesmen for Muslims, but not Muslims who disagree with the fatwa against Rushdie or who don’t want an Islamic state?

Hitchens points out this contradiction toward the end of the video: “If you say that Muslims are offended by this, and you lump them all together, you immediately grant that they are in fact represented by the most extreme, homicidal, fanatical, illiterate, intolerant people.” When looked at this way, it’s hard to see how Baroness Williams can believe she’s actually defending Muslims at all.

(Via DSTPFW and David Thompson)

The New York Times has an article on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent crackdown on dissent and “un-Islamic” behavior. It’s full of sickening details: men with “Western haircuts” forced to walk through the street sucking on jerry cans used for cleaning your bottom, Iranians with American citizenship not allowed to leave the country because they’re accused of being spies, student leaders thrown in prison for publishing “articles suggesting that no humans were infallible, including the Prophet Muhammad and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.” It’s worth reading in full to see what democrats, trade unionists and other reformers are up against in Iran.

But there’s an odd paragraph late in the article where the reporter, Neil MacFarquhar, writes:

“Iran can prove a difficult country to separate into black and white. Amid all the recent oppression, for example, last week the public stoning of a couple—the punishment for adultery—was called off. Women’s rights advocates had been agitating against it.”

I can’t see why the Iranian government’s decision in one instance not to carry out its standard barbaric punishment for adultery somehow suggests that we shouldn’t characterize it as fundamentally despotic, unjust, and illegitimate. If he means that we shouldn’t paint Iranians with the same brush as we do the Iranian state, he’s right, but that’s obvious from the article. It chronicles the many Iranians who are fighting against the state in small and large ways, putting their lives and security at risk to assert their rights and dignity in the face of an oppression that in the modern U.S. is very difficult to imagine.

It’s almost as if MacFarquhar (or possibly an editor or copyeditor) feared someone might think the article was biased or racist because it’s saying bad things about a non-Western government, so he had to throw in a paragraph to muddle up the obvious moral distinctions the rest of the article displays. See? We can’t say the government’s completely bad. They decided not to stone some adulterers, after all!

More on human rights abuses in Iran here.

Mick Hartley on the Sir Salman brouhaha:

“At least the latest tantrums from the Muslim world about Salman Rushdie’s knighthood should demonstrate to those who persist in thinking that all the suicide bombings, 9/11, 7/7, Madrid, Bali, are understandable reactions to Western provocation that, really, no, we’re dealing with a violent pathology here which feeds off a childish sense of grievance.”

Why is it so hard for some to think of violence committed in the name of Islam as a pathology, while it’s an automatic conclusion when violence is carried out in the name of a more private or eccentric set of beliefs? Because we give large collective faiths a greater legitimacy than they usually merit. Seung Hui Cho was a psychopath, Jim Jones a madman, but when it comes to suicide bombers we’re supposed to imagine that they’re just carrying out an intelligible political and cultural program through admittedly regrettable and possibly misguided means.

According to this article in the Washington Post, Virginia Tech mass murderer Seung Hui Cho “displayed many of the same characteristics of a criminal behavioral profile called the ‘Collector of Injustice,’ or someone who considers any misfortune against him the fault or responsibility of others.”

Cho used religious language in attempting to justify his rampage: “”I say we take up the cross, Children of Ishmael, take up our guns and knives . . . and take no prisoners and spare no lives.”

The article says the collector of injustice’s “compilation of wrongs becomes overloaded, and he lashes out violently to right them and get even with those who he believes have caused him misfortune and ridicule.”

What is the difference between Cho, whom everybody agrees was a psychopath, and the Islamic suicide bombers who kill themselves and others with such alarming frequency? Only that Cho’s “collection of injustices” was a private collection. The suicide bombers have thousands, perhaps millions, of people legitimating their grievances and the horrific “solution” to them by appealing to one of the world’s largest religions.

Norm writes about a hilarious piece by Matt Taibbi in Adbusters examining the creeping horror many leftists feel when someone describes them as “liberal.”

Taibbi is not, apparently, out to make new friends. He refers to the American left as “the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth.” I find much to agree with in the characterization, but I don’t agree that the term should be abandoned. The problem is that “liberal” has become, especially in the U.S., a synonym for “left.” As Norm points out, leftists have, to their shame, often embraced and defended regimes and institutions that are not liberal at all in the classical, and I would say proper, sense of the term. (The list of leftist betrayals of liberalism is long and by no means a thing of the past, as the continued enthusiasm among some leftists for thuggish autocrats like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez attests.)

If anything, the fact that so many are avoiding the term liberal is a good reason for those who believe in liberal principles (human rights, democracy, the rule of law, to name a few) to reclaim the term and bring it back to its historical use. The longer I live, the more I think the most important political distinction is not between left and right but between liberalism and the various forces of authoritarianism—religious, statist, and otherwise—that seek to impose their will on us. I’m quite happy to join other liberals, from the libertarian “right” to the democratic socialist “left,” to defend and extend liberal values in whatever small way I can despite my disagreement with these groups on some matters.

If anything, perhaps the label “left” should be abandoned, as there are far more sordid and embarassing statements being voiced by self-described members of the left than by the few people still willing to call themselves liberals.

Salman Rushdie has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. “Sir Salman” has a delightfully odd but mellifluous ring.

Of course, some are not happy. David Thompson and Norman Geras examine the ugly reaction and a particularly egregious example of condescending leftist vitriol about what the knighting “really” means.

It all adds up to depressing reading, and I worry that Sir Salman, who has recently been able to live relatively free of worry about the 1989 fatwa calling for his death, will face renewed threats. It’s a good time to remember Hitoshi Igarati, Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, who was murdered in 1991 for his services to literature. And to remember that defending liberal principles is not some decadent concern of overprivileged Westerners, but a matter of life and death.