Bollettino

Nicholas Lemann’s interesting Talk of the Town piece pokes through the ashes of one of the great original Cold War threatmongering sets, The Committee on The Present Danger. That Committee, formed in the McCarthy era to wrest anti-communism from the vulgar and demagogic and relocate it on a higher echelon – namely, Harvard – was headed by James Conant, the great patron of Thomas Kuhn, and one of Harvard’s “forward looking” presidents. Lemann points out that the first Committee was formed to advocate for a universal draft. And one of Conant’s assistants on this ultimately quixotic quest was John Kerry’s father.

Lemann’s history lesson backgrounds the spurious reconstruction of the Committee on The Present Danger, run by your usual assortment of neocon Post Office Wanted types: Joe Lieberman, Newt Gingrich, and the rest of the breathy, self-regarding crowd. They generated a little excitement by hiring an ex Reagan admin. employee who had been capturing a stream of revenue for his little ones by fronting for Jorg Haider’s neo-Nazis in D.C. Unfortunately, in a display of callousness towards the rules of the capitalist game, after word leaked that Peter Hannaford had fed on Haider’s leftovers, the man was tossed. But, according to the CPD, this is no time for distracting controversies. No, we have at least two more wars to drum up under the indefatigable leadership of George Bush. The Committee wants us to be aware of the militant Islamic threat. And the two major threats are, you guessed it, the Palestinians and the Iranians.

D.C. has been described as Hollywood for ugly people. These ugly people are, in fact, exceedingly Hollywoodish, having contrived one absolute bomb – the occupation of Iraq – and moving on to the occupation of Iraq 2: Iran, the evil twin. One’s faith in Kerry, who seems unable to mount a critique of the worst foreign policy disaster since the Vietnam war, wavers – until we realize what goodies the Bush culture has hidden up its sleeve. In another lifetime -- say, in 2000 -- I would dismiss that as stupid threatmongering of another order. Sure, extremists hang around the Republican party, but the outlines of foreign and domestic policy don't change that much. Now, of course, that isn't true. It is only too easy to see Bush charging into Iran, with an inadequate force, and killing tens of thousands of Iranians, and thousands of Americans, in pursuit of the Crusade: to make the world safe for Christianity.

This is not an election between two of the best and the brightest, but between a mad evangelical gunslinger and the town’s creepy High Church minister. What we need is to paint everything in America red -- a la High Plains Drifter -- and elect a willing midget president.

Bollettino

Martin Luther had suggested that before his Fall Adam "could have seen objects a hundred miles off better than we can see them at half a mile, and so in proportion with all the other senses."
-- Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Peter Harrison, Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 239-259

LI promised. last week, to dilate upon the charming intricacies of Joseph Glanvill – one of our promising posts, which the ardent reader might have reckoned among the graveyard of so many others – the extended post about ritual and novel reading, the post that continued the study of Francis Bacon and Thomas Babbington Macaulay, all the dead soldiers, all the semi-erudition, all the LI voice – trumpery and desperation. But no! We were serious this time.

However, after reading Peter Harrison’s excellent article, that deflation of our original motive set in. Glanvill, we originally thought, was some ignored genius of bad ideas – rather like that Victorian savant, Gosse, who wrote Omphalos, a book suggesting that the oh so uncomfortable fossil record indicating a date for the creation of the earth somewhat greater than Bishop Ussher’s reckoning of 6000 years was actually due to God strewing the planet with counterfeits – evidences of a past that never was. Borges, as our readers know, devoted an essay to Gosse, even as he admitted to never having read the book. But surely Glanvill’s thesis that all the instruments of science in the Early Modern Era – the microscope, the telescope, the improved compass – embodied, in dead metal and glass, Adam’s everyday sensorium – surely this deserved an essay in Borges’ finest style.

Glanvill is not a writer of Sir Thomas Brown’s dignity – is involuted prose seems less an attempt to overlay English with a Latinate brilliance than a flailing attempt to communicate from deep inside some ecclesiastical-scholarly hole. But about Adam, he is clear enough:

“Adam needed no Spectacles. The acuteness of his natural Opticks (if conjecture may have credit) shew'd him much of the Coelestial magnificence and bravery without a Galilaeo's tube: And 'tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of the upper World, as we with all the advantages of art. It may be 'twas as absurd even in the judgement of his senses, that the Sun and Stars should be so very much, less then this Globe, as the contrary seems in ours; and 'tis not unlikely that he had as clear a perception of the earths motion, as we think we have of its quiescence.”

Now, this emblematic, instrumental Adam, we thought, was a will of the whisp of Glanvill’s brain. But Harrison shows that, for the early modern scientists, science itself was a sign. For some, it was an eschatological sign – the regaining of Adam’s original perceptions, via, say, the microscope, meant that we were, perhaps, in the last days. This is a way of interpreting science that is simply bizarre, according to the positivist tradition. But there it is. Harrison’s essay refers to the work of other researchers who have complicated, to say the least, the Whig tradition of science history.

Harrison (whose insights into these historic currents make LI extremely jealous) has a nice graf summing up the Catholic religious context:

“A major point of contention in early-modern assessments of Adam's Fall and its cognitive effects was to do with the extent to which the faculties which Adam used to acquire knowledge were damaged. The Protestant reformers had typically tended to elevate the abilities of the prelapsarian Adam and stress the comparative depravity of the present human condition. Their negative appraisals of human cognitive powers were opposed to a long-standing scholastic view, according to which the natural perfections with which the human race had been originally endowed—including the powers of reason—had emerged relatively unscathed from the sorry episode in the Garden of Eden. The "natural gifts," wrote Thomas Aquinas, "remained after sin." Reason was one such natural gift. The "light of natural reason," Aquinas explained, "since it pertains to the species of the rational soul, is never forfeit from the soul." 26 What befell Adam after the Fall, was for Aquinas and his scholastic successors a privation only of supernatural powers, rather than a corruption of human nature. Subsequent developments in the theology of the Franciscans were even more dismissive of original sin, harking back to the more benign assessments of the nature of Adam's sin more typical of Church Fathers before Augustine. 27 The whole enterprise of natural theology, for which Aquinas' "five ways" is the classical model, was premised upon this optimistic view of the natural powers of the human intellect. Moreover, it was on this basis that the natural philosophy of the "pagan" writers, most notably Aristotle, was in principle acceptable to the medieval schools, for there was no reason to be suspicious of learning which had sprung from the exercise of natural and universal principles of reason. To be sure, Aristotle and the other ancients had known nothing of the divine will, nor of God's salvific plan; neither could they cultivate the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and love. But these deficiencies, however crucial they might prove on the day of judgment, would not prejudice the accumulation of natural knowledge.”

Harrison holds on to an important binary in finding his way through the labyrinth of Early Modern controversy. On the one hand, there is the view of imperfection as a negative thing, a loss; on the other hand, there is imperfection as corruption. Many English Protestants seem to cluster around the latter idea. From our viewpoint, the modern view – the rejection of reason as the guide to science, and the elevation of the senses – seems a wholly secular thing. But it was, at the time, interpreted by the actors involved in it in heavily theological terms. Adam was a continual reference. Harrison has dug up some wonderful quotes. We love this one from Robert South, an English divine, who contrasts Adam’s time, in which "Study was not then a duty, night watchings were needless," with our current sad state: “the doom of fallen man, to labour in the fire, to seek truth in profundo, to exhaust his time and impair his health, and perhaps to spin out his days, and himself into one pitiful, controverted conclusion."

LI could easily take that as a motto.

Bollettino

So we are having an election between two candidates who both think going into Iraq when we did was just fine and dandy. One believes in magic thinking, as Freud called it – that his thoughts directly operate on the world. It helps that God, in the usual trinity shape – your Dad, Dick Cheney, and the holy ghost of CEO America – has spoken to you directly. One believes in complicated thinking—that is, he believes that you have to amass a bodyguard of excuses to justify hope being on the way as you carefully avoid making any commitment to any action whatsoever. One believes in the Coalition of the Willing, the other believes in the Coalition of the Unwilling -- that somehow other allies are going to take a look at the shark filled pool in Iraq and want to jump right in, given a sweet invitation with an RSVP attached. One asks the question, knowing what we know right now, would you have gone into Iraq, and the other answers yes, proving that Mutual Destruction is not only a theory of nuclear deterrence but an apt description of the Bush/Kerry contest.

Meanwhile, the polls show the majority of Americans would answer no. Those people don’t have a candidate.

What the war is about – what the mission accomplished – is glimpsed in this offhand report from the WP. The reporter, who is obviously having an identity crisis (am I a war correspondent or a rodeo rider?) begins with a few macho references to 'dip', as though he'd been embedded in a baseball dugout. But he proceeds to describe, in detail that cannot be excrutiating enough, the senseless deaths of two American soldiers, one a boy of 19, the other a father, patrolling, for reasons that nobody understands, a region of Western Iraq that we had no business occupying, and that we are busy enacting our Pavlovian passive aggressive foreign policy on. Here's what happens -- a sniper kills one guy, a bomb kills another, and a town is searched for the sniper; an Iraqi military officer is consulted, and he unrolls the Allawi world vision -- shoot one person from each residence -- that has "same as the old boss' written all over it. It is evident, just from the description of the Iraqi young men that were forced to lie in the dirt with their hands behind their backs while soldiers broke locks on various shop doors, that another reason to hate America is being generated in this little affair. If there were any justice, the names of the guys -- Gunnery Sgt. Elia Fontecchio, 30, and Lance Cpl. Joseph Nice, 19 -- would be tatooed on Bush's butt.

But they won't be. There is no justice. This war shows, among other things, how far this country has drifted from having political mechanisms that are ultimately controlled by the people. The only thing the people can control are their tears, as they count up the losses and fight undignified battles with a government for a bare minimum of benefits.

And Kerry -- ready to report for duty Kerry -- would have said yes to this marriage to the bride of Frankenstein? I can't think of a sicker statement.

Bollettino

So we are having an election between two candidates who both think going into Iraq when we did was just fine and dandy. One believes in magic thinking, as Freud called it – that his thoughts directly operate on the world. It helps that God, in the usual trinity shape – your Dad, Dick Cheney, and the holy ghost of CEO America – has spoken to you directly. One believes in complicated thinking—that is, he believes that you have to amass a bodyguard of excuses to justify hope being on the way as you carefully avoid making any commitment to any action whatsoever. One believes in the Coalition of the Willing, the other believes in the Coalition of the Unwilling -- that somehow other allies are going to take a look at the shark filled pool in Iraq and want to jump right in, given a sweet invitation with an RSVP attached. One asks the question, knowing what we know right now, would you have gone into Iraq, and the other answers yes, proving that Mutual Destruction is not only a theory of nuclear deterrence but an apt description of the Bush/Kerry contest.

Meanwhile, the polls show the majority of Americans would answer no. Those people don’t have a candidate.

What the war is about – what the mission accomplished – is glimpsed in this offhand report from the WP. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61168-2004Aug12?language=printer The correspondent, who is obviously having an identity crisis (am I a war correspondent or a rodeo rider?) begins with a few macho references to 'dip', as though he'd been embedded in a baseball dugout. But he proceeds to describe, in detail that cannot be excrutiating enough, the senseless deaths of two American soldiers, one a boy of 19, the other a father, patrolling, for reasons that nobody understands, a region of Western Iraq that we had no business occupying, and that we are busy enacting our Pavlovian passive aggressive foreign policy on. Here's what happens -- a sniper kills one guy, a bomb kills another, and a town is searched for the sniper; an Iraqi military officer is consulted, and he unrolls the Allawi world vision -- shoot one person from each residence -- that has "same as the old boss' written all over it. It is evident, just from the description of the Iraqi young men that were forced to lie in the dirt with their hands behind their backs while soldiers broke locks on various shop doors, that another reason to hate America is being generated in this little affair. If there were any justice, the names of the guys -- Gunnery Sgt. Elia Fontecchio, 30, and Lance Cpl. Joseph Nice, 19 -- would be tatooed on Bush's butt.

But they won't be. There is no justice. This war shows, among other things, how far this country has drifted from having political mechanisms that are ultimately controlled by the people. The only thing the people can control are their tears, as they count up the losses and fight undignified battles with a government for a bare minimum of benefits.

And Kerry -- ready to report for duty Kerry -- would have said yes to this marriage to the bride of Frankenstein? I can't think of a sicker statement.

Bollettino

“Genocide by force of habit”


We highly recommend Alex de Waal’s essay on Darfur in the London Review of Books. de Waal has been in contact with Darfur since the seventies. The piece is full of heartbreaking contrasts. For instance, de Waal presents a Bowles-like picture of meeting one of the leaders of a nomadic group in Darfur, the Jalul, a nazir, Sheikh Hilal Musa, in 1985.
“I met the elderly nazir, Sheikh Hilal Musa, in 1985. His tent was hung with the paraphernalia of a lifetime's nomadism - water jars, saddles, spears, swords, leather bags and an old rifle. He invited me to sit opposite him on a fine Persian rug, summoned his retainer to serve sweet tea on a silver platter, and told me the world was coming to an end. At that time, Darfur was gripped by drought and disturbing changes were afoot. The Saharan winds were blowing sand onto fertile hillsides, and when it rained the water was cutting gullies through the rich alluvial soil along the wadi. Worse, the villagers who had always played host to camel nomads were now barring their migrations, and stopping them from using pastures and wells.”

It comes as a shock to read that this man’s son is Musa Hilal, the leader of the Janjawiid, the militia group used by Khartoum to massacre the Fur. Among other interesting things that go against the grain of the CV in the West and my expectations as a reader, de Waal writes about the spiritual founder of the current Islamicist regime, Hassan al-Turabi (who is now languishing in prison for disturbing the Bashir government with a little too much fervor) that he “broadened the agenda and constituency of the Islamist movement. For example, he insisted that women had rights in Islam, and today more than half of the undergraduates at Khartoum University are women. He also recognised the authenticity of western Sudanese and West African Islam, thus embracing the traditions exemplified by the early 19th-century Fulani jihads and the wandering Sufi scholars of the Maghreb.”

De Waal has found himself in the predicament, so flattering to the vanity of the expert, and so indicative of the disaster that has befallen his particular field of expertise, of appearing in all the papers and magazines that give us the instant wisdom about Sudan. He wrote a book about a previous famine in Darfur. However, one must also admit there is something tired about de Waal’s vision – it is as if he had fatalistically accepted the fact that other nations will simply talk themselves through the Darfur famine/massacre. They will neither prevent the burning, looting, raping and mass murder, nor satisfactorily alleviate the deaths from hunger, dehydration, and various ensuing diseases. Ghost after ghost will burn.
LI has been in correspondence about Sudan with a conservative friend, who thinks it is all the French. This is a weird idea, stemming from the misconception that the French have a large, vital economic stake in Sudan’s oil fields. In actuality, Total/Elf’s stake, although large in acreage, is actually a dead loss to the company, since the stake hasn’t produced for some twenty years.
Beyond the French, this friend’s challenge to LI has been, what would you do? And LI’s answer is that if we had the power, we would like to see some no-fly cordon thrown over Darfur like the cordon that was thrown over Northern Iraq in the early nineties. Apparently, the Janjawiid, use helicopters to make their raids. Apparently, those helicopters are supplied by the Russians and the Chinese. These, we think, should be knocked down. Similarly, convoys or encampments of Janjawiid should be dispersed.
There are a lot of problems with our “solution.” The first one is – a man can’t glance in the papers once every decade, read about a distant battle between unknown forces on a terrain he has never seen, and pluck his solutions from the air. My solution is one endorsed by many visiting experts and op ed handjob artists. But they are not, themselves, going to suffer if it fails. Here are some problems I foresee: its potential for inciting the Sudanese government to once again go psycho; or, alternatively, creating a zone in which the Fur people feel comfortable enough to massacre the Arabs.
This is what de Waal writes: “The best, and perhaps the only, means of disarmament is that employed by the British seventy-five years ago: establish a working local administration, regulate the ownership of arms, and gradually isolate the outlaws and brigands who refuse to conform. It took a decade then, and it won't be any faster today. Not only are there more weapons now, but the political polarities are much sharper.”
Samantha Powers, who has another view, is interviewed by Liberation and has this to say:

And what to do if Khartoum refuses to bend?

Build a diplomatic coalition to pressure the government, which brilliantly exploits the least division in the occidental camp. And encourage the deployment of a international standing for composed of African contingents in order to avoid Sudan playing the card of the Occident against the Moslems. The West’s essential role would consist of the delivery of these troops.

Bollettino

LI feels pretty shamefaced that we are way behind a breaking story. Corinne Maier is an economist at Electricité de France. She works part time. She usefully used her free time to write a guide to fooling around at work, Bonjour Paresse, or Hello Laziness. Sensibly enough, she knows most of us, while filled with bitterness and mockery towards the corporate behemoths, still labor in our little cubicles to make them happy. What are we to do – become revolutionaries? That’s a bit out of date, and they pick you up and put you in unpleasant prisons and whatnot. So Maier advises the art of reading the newspaper discretely, missing meetings, taking long lunches, and leaving early. Also – never go out in the hall without a file under your arm.

The poor woman somehow attracted the attention of the bosses. Her pamphlet was published by a small press, but somebody must have slipped a copy under some muckety muck’s door. According to Liberation:

En mai, Corinne Maier, chercheuse économiste d'EDF, publie un pamphlet sur le monde de l'entreprise : Bonjour paresse, de l'art et de la nécessité d'en faire le moins possible en entreprise (1) (Libération du 10 mai). Deux mois après, elle est convoquée pour un entretien en vue d'une sanction. Motif : «Non-respect de l'obligation de loyauté manifestée à plusieurs reprises : lire le journal en réunion, quitter les réunions de groupe, révélateur de la stratégie individuelle clairement affichée dans l'ouvrage Bonjour paresse, visant à gangrener le système de l'intérieur.» [Aiming to gangrene the system from within? Shades of Stalin’s wreckers!!!] Et avoir fait état de sa qualité d'agent EDF sans autorisation.
Prétextes. «Depuis douze ans, je suis une salariée sans histoire, s'étonne Corinne Maier. Et subitement, ils découvrent que je suis une pétroleuse car je sèche une réunion...» Les motifs affichés par la direction ne sont que des prétextes, estime l'intersyndicale montée pour l'occasion : de nombreux chercheurs EDF écrivent articles et livres sans jamais être inquiétés. «Quant à lire son journal en réunion, n'en parlons pas, rigole Yann Cochin, de SUD Energie. Arriver avec une pile de dossiers et travailler dessus en pleine réunion pour montrer qu'on est débordé, c'est le top du top... [As for reading her newspaper at meetings, don’t even say it,” chuckles Yan Cochin, of SUD Energy. “You come with a pile of files and you work on them in plain sight to show how overwhelmed you are, that’s the top of the top]. Au mieux, la réaction de la direction est un gag grotesque. Au pire, un acte liberticide : l'entreprise veut tenir un rôle grandissant dans la société et nous n'aurions pas le droit de la critiquer ?»

Another article about her is in the Telegraph, which gives the colorful list of her chapter titles: “Chapter titles include "The cretins who sit next to you", "Business culture my arse" and "Why you lose nothing by resigning".

Googling her name, I discovered that she is, all so discretely, a Lacanian. Who says the Lacanian Maos are dead? We are just sleeping, darlin'.

“…nay, is not the Universe itself, at bottom, properly an Intrigue?” – Thomas Carlyle

In the late nineties, Norma Baig was in trouble. She had, for instance, the FBI on her tail. They were interested in whether she had tried to defraud her mother, Asma Bagain, by claiming that her mother’s house was her own in order to borrow money against it. Then there was the court complaint that she had beat her mother in law and threatened to kill her, which was part of the general mess, apparently, of being married to John Toliopoulos. During one of her separations from Toliopoulos, she stayed with a woman named Brandy Murphy. According to the Australian paper The Age, Brandy only learned that she was living with a genius when Norma left:

"Norma left Chicago on the Labour Day weekend in August 1999. I had been her best friend for five years. We were inseparable. I thought I knew everything about Norma, so when she left I was really upset. I used to sit in her room and cry."
…

"She once told me that she was writing a book," Ms Murphy said, "but that it was too private and personal to show me. After she left, I found some things she had written which were pure fantasy about her father, and how she wanted to die and thought she was evil. It was really heartbreaking stuff."

One likes to hear stories like this. It is like an anecdote in Vasari – one of those about a famous artist who was discovered, all naïve and shepherding and shit, drawing some perspective laden scene by another artist, and taken up and educated in a studio. For Norma’s little sketch pointed to the larger life ahead of her as a Fake. Not a minor fake, not an everyday seller of promises that never pan out, not a down on her high heels confidance man – no, that wasn’t Norma. The sketch about being, to use Alice Walker’s disgusting verb, incested, was all about an instinct. Yes, in the early nineties, if you were going to make it big in the confession game, incest was what it was all about. Daddy peeping in on you, Daddy and you in the shower, the return of all your repressed memories via the wonders of modern therapy, with its rediscovery of an innocence within children of all sexual knowledge that a psychoanalyst could only gape at. Roll over Sigmund Freud and tell Mrs. Grundy the news. This was when we were living in a nation that believed, in its tiny little heart, that day care centers could double as Satanic cult drive-ins; this was a nation willing to arrest, in one case, almost a whole police force (in Olympia, Washington), on the charge that they had been making with the big cloven hoofed guy and forking babies and such. This, as we now know, was the acme of progress and Western Civilization.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Norma left that sketch behind because, I believe, she knew, with the instinct of a great artist, that the time for mere tales of sodomizing were past. The fake’s art consists of finding just the right combination for the historical moment. Norma, fleeing the US with her husband in 1999, arrives in Australia. And then – another Norma appears. Norma Khouri. This Norma has a heartfelt tale to tell, a tale to make you cry. It is an especially heartwarming and shocking tale in the age of the new Crusade, the Post 9/11 era when the West discovered how civilized it was, after all, especially compared to the Middle East. In the era of the New Crusade, the right, which formerly gave its considered opinion about feminism by coining the term femi-nazi, was suddenly very, very upset at the condition of women in Moslem countries. In the Clinton years, Wendy Shalit could write a feeble anti-feminist book that ends on a note of respect for the Taliban’s enforcement of the laws of chador, and that book would be praised by no less than George Will; but in the era of the New Crusade, it turns out that feminism is one of the things that make us Good – as compared to the Bad, which was, in general, anything Middle Eastern (save Israel). Whether from instinct or from sheer brilliance, Norma Baig dropped the memoir about being ‘incested’ and wrote a book that conformed perfectly to the new victim vogue. How much better to show how much better we were than our enemies -- who, it turns out, weren't even Christian! So was born a seering memoir of Norma’s adventures in Lebanon, and the death of her best buddy Dalia. Dalia, the ravishing daughter of a Moslem brute, falls in love with a Christian. Secret, chaste meetings ensue, but Daddy (borrowing the murderous patriarch theme from Norma’s previous sketch) lurks, dagger in hand, in the shadows. With twelve blows of the dagger he dispatches his fair daughter, with only Norma left to tell the tale.

And so Norma’s memoir appears, and Norma is everywhere – Norma Khouri, the woman who fled from Lebanon. Tears spring to her eyes, a fund is mounted for the victims of honor killing, there are readings in high schools and art festivals, and appearances on American tv to promote Honor Lost – the title of the book for the American market – and everything is going swimmingly. In the background, it is true, there is the nattering of Arab women – Jordanian women, actually. According to the Christian Science Herald:

“The National Commission for Women in Jordan had independently discovered more than 70 errors in her book and sent this information earlier to Random House and to Simon & Schuster. Random House replied at the time that they stood by their author after being satisfied that she had changed names and places to protect people in Jordan.”

Alas, as the spirit of the New Crusade has dwindled, we have discovered a lot of, uh, intelligence errors. That first fine bloom of Western Civ triumphalism – that period after 9/11 when some of our greatest intellectuals, like Italian prime minister Berlusconi, proclaimed the unadulterated superiority of the West, or that portion of it with white faces, over the East, a sneaky and retrograde part of the Earth that needs a good invasion to set it straight – has rather wilted.

And so too has Norma’s story. The Sydney Herald investigated Norma Khouri and found Norma Baig. They found a married woman, not a single one; they found a refugee from Chicago and debt, rather than Lebanon and honor killing. And they published the story.

In so doing, they have elevated Norma Khouri. As a victim, Khouri was minor. As a Fake, however, she’s become a Rorschach test for the Zeitgeist. The crossing over of a particularly malignant strand of liberal decay – therapeutic liberalism, with its blind identity of victimhood with goodness – with conservative resentment finds its great artistic achievement in Norma. Her book could be praised not only by Ms. magazine, but by the National Review. A particularly heartfelt review of the book appeared in the American Outlook, penned by a NR contributor, Katherine Lopez. It begins with the standard Rightwing windup:

“To most Americans, and Westerners generally, it is inconceivable. A father kills his daughter because she fell for the wrong guy. But move East, and in some cultures that is just what is done. A reality no one speaks of.
Norma Khouri can’t stand the silence. She’s written Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan in honor of her best friend, Dalia. Dalia and Khouri met when they were three, and, as Khouri tells it, were nearly inseparable for the next twenty-two years. They were always challenging their culture, Dalia’s religion, and her father. They managed to convince him to allow them to open a hair salon in Amman. It was in the salon where she found the happiness that would ultimately lead to her death penalty.

Dalia, twenty-six years old, was killed—stabbed twelve times with a kitchen knife—for the sake of her family’s honor. Her scandalous behavior? She was seen in public with a Catholic man.”

You will not see such an outpouring of sympathy from the NRO about, say, the statesponsored kidnapping of the children of lesbians in this country, or the stabbing to death of some prostitute and the malign neglect of the ensuing police investigation. But for one brief shining moment, the party of Phyllis Schlafley was on the barricades with Gloria Steinem.
This was not simply an accident. Norma’s book, like all great Cons, is designed to confirm the beliefs of its marks. There is a delicacy in these things that shouldn’t be underestimated. There are two parts of Norma’s work that are particularly beautiful and must be saluted.

One was the creation of Dalia. As the daughter of a Moslem, of course she longs for fairer, Christian men. The opera must go on! But if Norma’s drama were set in, say, America, Dalia would have probably been, shall we say, physically intimate with her Christian knight. But no – Dalia, in her twenties, was entirely chaste! For a crowd that advocates the teaching of abstinence with truly Taliban like fervor, this was a dream come true. However much the New Crusaders vaunted the freedom of women, briefly, in that small post 9/11 moment, they were still the standard anti-abortion, anti-sex, and pro-family crowd we’ve all come to know and love. The same people who consider the showing of Janet Jackson’s nipple a major cause for legal reform. Norma’s infallible instinct here is truly dialectical. It elevates her, to my mind, from mere con artist to artist, period.

An artist, as opposed to a con artist, longs for a signature. And this is the second brilliant thing about Norma. In that wicked Eastern land where, unlike the U.S. or Australia, men are brutes to women, a certain dream logic takes hold. Just as Shakespeare set one of his romances in a Bohemia with a seacoast, so, too, Norma’s individuality revolts in her very text and discretely devises a signal that says: I am the maker of this thing. This supposed refugee from Lebanon gives her country a border with Kuwait.

The New York times ran an op ed piece by an Australian writer who asked the question: how did she get away with it? For Norma was more than a writer – she was a personality. She loved the spotlight. One is reminded of Carlyle’s essay on the Affair of the Necklaces. That affair was recently a movie, starring Hilary Swank – which is how we get our history out here in the sticks. Jean de la Motte, aka Valois, tricked the Cardinal de Rohan into buying a diamond necklace, ostensively for Marie Antoinette. Jean found some strumpet to play Marie, pocketed Rohan’s money, and sold the diamonds before she was caught. Ever afterwards people have wondered how Rohan could fall for such an obvious dupe, and how Jean could have hoped to get away with it. Carlyle writes:

“Cheerfully admitting these statements to be all lies; we ask, How any
mortal could, or should, so lie?

The Psychologists, however, commit one sore mistake: that of
searching, in every character named human, for something like a
Conscience. Being mere contemplative recluses, for most part, and
feeling that Morality is the Heart of Life, they judge that with all the
world it is so. Nevertheless, as practical men are aware, Life can go
on in excellent vigour, without crotchet of that kind. What is the
essence of Life? Volition? Go deeper down, you find a much more
universal root and characteristic: Digestion. While Digestion lasts,
Life cannot, in philosophical language, be said to be extinct: and
Digestion will give rise to Volitions enough; at any rate, to Desires
and attempts, which may pass for such. He who looks neither before
nor after, any farther than the Larder and State-room, which latter is
properly the finest compartment of the Larder, will need no Worldtheory,
Creed as it is called, or Scheme of Duties: lightly leaving the
world to wag as it likes with any theory or none, his grand object is
a theory and practice of ways and means. Not goodness or badness
is the type of him; only shiftiness or shiftlessness.”

Which is all there is to say about Norma, probably. One so hopes she doesn’t spoil everything by reverting to plan A (Daddy abused me). An artist should not go back on her work. At the moment, she is in seclusion, compiling evidence that she really has been living on the coast of Bohemia. A parallel news story caught our eye, however, as we were relishing Norma. Among the complaints about Norma is that the money that has supposedly been collected, through her agency, to help the suffering victims of honor killings in Jordan has seemingly disappeared en route. In keeping with Norma’s perfect sense of the Zeitgeist, the WP, similarly, reported that the U.S., tenderly stewarding the oil wealth of Iraq for the Iraqis, has inezplicably spent that money (who’d have thought it!) on big American defense contractors:

“For the first 14 months of the occupation, officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority provided little detailed information about the Iraqi money, from oil sales and other sources, that it spent on reconstruction contracts. They have said that it was used for the benefit of the Iraqi people and that most of the contracts paid from Iraqi money went to Iraqi companies. But the CPA never released information about specific contracts and the identities of companies that won them, citing security concerns, so it has been impossible to know whether these promises were kept.
The CPA has said it has awarded about 2,000 contracts with Iraqi money. Its inspector general compiled records for the major contracts, which it defined as those worth $5 million or more each. Analysis of those and other records shows that 19 of 37 major contracts funded by Iraqi money went to U.S. companies and at least 85 percent of the total $2.26 billion was obligated to U.S. companies. The contracts that went to U.S. firms may be worth several hundred million more once the work is completed.”
Surely, if Norma is utterly shamed in Australia, she should have a job waiting for her at the Pentagon.