New Yorker, April 25. And a Small Rant

In the first Talk of the Town piece, a damning quote from Tom DeLay in the New Yorker (April 25, 2005), taken from an interview with him in the Washington Times:

“I blame Congress over the last fifty to a hundred years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that’s nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn’t stop them.”

We should have children in school start practicing their stiff-armed salutes and goose stepping for Congressman DeLay’s glorious new Reich.

Also, in Talk of the Town, there is a wonderful little piece about a South Korean director, Shin Sang Ok, who was kidnapped by Kim Jong Il in 1978 and forced to direct a movie. The movie? Pulgasari. A monster movie about a beast that grows as he eats cannons and saves a group of farmers oppressed by an evil king. The monster was played by Kenpachiro Satsuma, who played Godzilla several times. Shin and his wife, Choi Un Hui (who was also kidnapped), managed to escape while they were traveling to Vienna in 1986. Why does North Korea have such a difficult time being taken seriously? Because it lives in a political reality that exists only in 3^rd-rate political thrillers and…North Korea.

When was the last time Shouts and Murmurs was…uh…funny? I used to love Paul Rudnick, and Social Disease was a favorite book of mine in high school and college. I think he started to decline when he started writing plays. My Living Will is a type-by-numbers affair, influenced by a Fran Leibowitz piece read long ago. I did like the last entry, though: “At my memorial service, I would like my clergyman to begin his eulogy with the words ‘I suppose, in a way, we all killed him.’”

A fun history essay by Ian Frazier about Baghdad’s history, and if Arab nations are correct in comparing America to the Mongols. Followed by a solid piece of investigative science reporting by Elizabeth Kolbert about global warming. Pretty picture, too. It’s the first of a three-part article.

Phillip Roth remembers Saul Bellow by reprinting several long letters Bellow wrote him. Mr Roth didn’t see any need to edit them, and the editors didn’t see any need to, you know, edit (getting their portfolios ready for some kind of job over at Vanity Fair?), so the result is a lot of repeated paragraphs and no dates to anchor when these letters were written (which could have helped demonstrate why Bellow recounted the same scenes over and over again).

Hilton Als writes about Martin McDonagh, a hot new playwright who’s latest is “The Pillowman”. The name of the play comes at the bottom of the third column. Either McDonagh is thrillingly obtuse, or Als had restless fingers. And, I think, he gives away the ending of the play? I don’t know. Some of these theatre reviews have a hard time holding my attention. And half of the time they don’t talk much about the effing play.

Rounding things out is a big, juicy essay on the new biography John Brown, Abolitionist by David S Reynolds. Many of us got a leg up on this subject thanks to Sara Vowell’s This American Life essay on the history of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The tune came from a Civil War song with lyrics like “John Brown’s body is a-moulderin’ in the grave.” Which is where the title of the review “John Brown’s Body” comes from.

Notes on Politics.

The President is back from a visit to Central and Eastern Europe celebrating the 60^th anniversary of VE day. It’s a dicey thing for anyone, since the end of World War II, for many countries, meant the Nazis were replaced with Stalin. The President used every opportunity to grandstand for “Democracy” and “Freedom” and indicated this was something that has blossomed under His administration. Witness: the Rose Revolution, elections in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Uh…okay. The elections in Afghanistan and Iraq were not triumphs of democracy: they came about because the US invaded and toppled the existing regimes. And Central Europe’s democratic revolutions have been hard-fought and hard-won by people over the last decade and a half. You’d need to read a newspaper to know that, though. Oh, and about that democracy thing? The President keeps forgetting he lost the popular vote in when he first got his job, and activist judges in the Supreme Court handed him the victory.