This is the first third or half or some such of the Peretz chapter; go ahead and take a look and tell me what you think. Put any corrections in bold, if you would please. Ignore the urls that show up on occasion (http://whatever.blahblahblah.com, that sort of thing); those are footnotes and are formatted as such in my Google document.
Love,
Your most responsible child by default
Martin Peretz
Those selected for inclusion in this
book were
picked out by reference to two criteria, with the first of these
entailing that the chapter subject be well-known and respected
among those who generally ascribe to the pundit's politics.
Martin Peretz is only slightly well-known among liberals and
moderates of the general population, and being no more widely
respected than he is widely prominent, he certainly wouldn't seem to
make the cut. But as the other bit of criteria entails being
unqualified to serve in whatever role one plays in the national
dialogue, Peretz more than makes up for his lack of mainstream
notability, sort of like when someone does very poorly on the math
section of the
SAT but still pulls a 790 on the verbal, except in a bad way.
This is not to say that Peretz would have done poorly on either
section of his SATs. He is extraordinarily knowledgeable and
well-informed on a number of subjects and lays claim to a distinctive
academic background, having been an assistant professor of social
studies at Harvard, which even honored him in 1993 by establishing the
Martin Peretz Chair in Yiddish Literature. Most notably, he has
served for over three decades variously as editor-in-chief and owner
of The New Republic, which in turn has served for over a century
as one of the nation's most justifiably respected sources of social
and political commentary.
Peretz, then, is a smart fellow and knows quite a bit
about quite a bit. The problem is that he doesn't know how the things
he knows should fit together. If knowledge were a jigsaw puzzle,
Peretz wouldn't begin by sorting the pieces into groups based on
similar color schemes in order that he might better undertake the
gradual process of fitting them all together, this being the common
methodology among those who make it their business to complete jigsaw
puzzles. Instead, he would begin by
composing a terribly-written editorial to the effect that the Arabs
are a warlike and untrustworthy people. Incidentally,
Peretz's more bizarre outbursts are, as well shall see, almost always
prompted by scorn for Arabs and Muslims. Far more incidentally, the
jigsaw
puzzle was of some ducks swimming in a river, and then there's a bunch
of trees off to the background and a couple of deer.
Peretz's ridiculousness is widely acknowledged by the lucid and
attentive, including many folks who actually agree with most of the
chap's political views. His poor reputation even extends to his own
magazine, an
open secret that I have unnecessarily confirmed by way of
conversations with two former TNR staffers. Here's a pertinent
excerpt:
Me: Does anyone at The New Republic respect Peretz
as a writer or a thinker or-
Former Staffer: No.
The person in question was quick to add that
Peretz is indeed smart and well-informed and that his virtues as a
publisher and editor are just as universally acknowledged among those
associated with the publication as are his vices as an essayist,
pundit, and civilized human being. He/she wasn't just trying to be nice, either; under Peretz's
run, TNR has published consistently superior content by some of the
nation's most relevant and capable commentators on the subjects of politics and
culture, which is to say on everything.
Were Peretz content to serve in that capacity, he would be
rightfully known as among the finest of publishers. The universe being
flawed, though, he chooses to write as well - frequently on his
TNR-associated blog, occasionally for the print magazine itself, and
sporadically in
the pages of conservative publications such Commentary and
Wall Street Journal, where he may occasionally be found
expressing agreement with Republicans on foreign policy and topics of
adjacency. This willingness to criticize his own party on a range of
issues is admirable, and would be more admirable still if his
criticisms were not so often directed at the wrong things, or if these
criticisms did not so often apply also to those for whom he has only
praise, or if so many of these criticisms were not absolutely insane.
Again, our universe is flawed.
Worse than Peretz's various offenses against logic is
the great violence that he insists on doing to the English language by
way of astonishing stylistic deficits and endless grammatical errors.
To his credit, those stylistic failures are so inimitably bizarre that
Noam Chomsky should probably be analysing them for clues with regards
to the origins of human linguistics, and even the manner in which the
editor tramples upon fundamental aspects of grammar is consistently
innovative. Let us examine a few examples culled from his blog:
I
count as authoritative someone who hasn't misled me too much. Well, I
sat with one of these authoritatives last night and she was giving me
news, future news about the news.
The New York Post and Reuters
both report not exactly that Bernie Madoff has cancer. But that he's
told his fellow inmates that he has cancer, pancreatic cancer, at that.
Which means that, if the tale is true, he'll be a goner soon, very
soon. Unless there's a medical miracle, as sometimes there is even in
such terrible afflictions of the pancreas.
Even the U.N. characterizes Congo as "the
rape capital of the world." Alas, there are 18,000 U.N. peacekeepers in
the country ... and they only make the circumstances worse. Yes, quite
literally.
This last instance merits special attention. When the term "literally"
is deployed in error, it is almost always in the
his-ears-were-literally-steaming sense, yet Peretz has here managed to
invent an entirely new misuse of the adverb. He is worth reading if one
approaches him as a sort of anti-William Safire, perhaps useful for
those who have gotten too stuffy and self-congratulating in their
command of the English language.
The second
instance also merits special attention insomuch as that anyone who
writes such a thing does not deserve the protection of our state and
federal laws. Here, let me show it to you again:
The New York Post and Reuters
both report not exactly that Bernie Madoff has cancer. But that he's
told his fellow inmates that he has cancer, pancreatic cancer, at that.
Which means that, if the tale is true, he'll be a goner soon, very
soon. Unless there's a medical miracle, as sometimes there is even in
such terrible afflictions of the pancreas.
I don't even know how to make fun of this other than to simply repeat
it over and over again without additional comment. If you turn to the
back of this book, you will find a special section in which I have done
just that.
One could reasonably dismiss
Peretz's poor style as irrelevant to the question of his usefulness to
the republic. Alternatively, one could take a sampling of his terrible,
terrible sentences and use them to introduce various chapter sections,
with each of these focusing on a particular topic that Peretz has
gotten terribly, terribly wrong. And that is what we shall do.
***
Peretz on Iran
There is much that even an economically
challenged West can do to put Iran back into the well, let's say the
twentieth century. (Nothing can yet bring it to the twenty-first.)
- Martin Peretz, February 2009
Soon after Iran's state news agency released
what it claimed to be the results of the nation's 2009 presidential
election, Western analysts came to general agreement that
President Ahmadinejad's alleged 63 percent victory
could only have been the result of fraud. Middle East experts such as
Juan Cole noted that the official results flew in the face of
well-established regional and ethnic electoral trends, and as the days
went by, dozens of blatant irregularities were confirmed by
international observers. The obviousness of the electoral theft was
such that American pundits of every ideology found themselves in rare
unity on the subject, with most everyone concerned expressing support
for those Iranians who took to the streets in an attempt to restore the
fundamental right that had so clearly been stripped from them.
As is always the case with such affairs as this, there were those whose
agendas demanded that the election be considered legitimate.
Ahmadinejad, for instance, was firmly in Ahmadinejad's corner on this
one, while the Chinese and Russian governments were both
quick to congratulate the incumbent on maintaining the status quo in a
nation strategic to both regimes. Kim Jong Il expressed particular
delight over his Persian counterpart's overt intention to deflect
Western pressure and thereby score a victory for the self-determination
of despots.
And then there was Martin Peretz. "I
wish I could harbor even a smidgen of the confidence the vice president
has that Dr. Ahmadinejad's sweep was really a fraud," he wrote at the
time in reference to a statement Biden had made to the effect that the
election had probably been stolen. "My
impression is that the incumbent's margin of victory was too big to
have been fraudulent and the loser's numbers also too big. Tyrannies don't play around with the numbers
like this. A dictator
usually wants 99% of the voters to have been for him... Maybe
the
regime fiddled around a bit with the numbers at the polls and
after the polling. Still, the outcome had a sense of
authenticity." To summarize, then, the Iranian regime didn't "play
around" with the numbers so much as it simply "fiddled around a bit"
with
them, which is to say that the regime both did and did not change the
results of the vote, and at any rate a "sense of authenticity" had been
achieved thereby.
Peretz is smart enough that he would not have come to this
self-contradictory and all-around nonsensical conclusion unless he had
some overriding purpose for doing so. In this case, that purpose is to
prevent his readers from coming to a self-evident and obviously correct
conclusion - that the majority of Iranian voters had rejected the worst
of Iranian presidents. Peretz prefers to avoid such a conclusion
because it works against one of his most commonly expressed desires,
which is to see Iran bombed as soon as possible.
The desire
for the U.S. or Israel to strike at Iran in order to prevent its
fundamentalist regime from acquiring nuclear weaponry is a common
position. It is also a position worthy of serious consideration if one
holds, as I do, that a relatively free nation is well within its rights
to attack the military assets of any dictatorial regime at any time. In
fact, I happen to agree with Peretz and many Iran hawks that opposition
to military action is groundless to the extent that it derives from the
belief that an illegitimate government has some sort of right to
operate without interference from the planet's relatively free nations.
But there exists a very reasonable cause for opposition to the bombing
approach as well - that air strikes against Iran would not necessarily
assist in either Western security or Iranian freedom, and would likely
run counter to both.
It does not take an extensive reading
of history to be aware that foreign threats generally prompt domestic
unity, itself almost invariably taking the form of "pragmatic" statism
and muddled nationalism. Nor does it require a deep understanding of modern Iran to determine that Ahmadinejad
would use any such strike as a means by which to discredit the
opposition for supposedly siding with the nation's enemies. We see this
phenomenon everywhere, even in the public discourse of our own nation;
the Reader will no doubt recall a time not long ago when a certain
Texan megalomaniac took to painting his opponents as taking the side of
America's most despicable adversaries. I am referring, of course, to
two paragraphs back, when I associated Martin Peretz with North Korea,
Russia, and China for having joined those nation's leaders in
supporting Ahmadinejad's claim to
electoral legitimacy. I will address my hypocrisy in this matter in its
proper place later in the chapter.
Being a mediocre thinker who has attached himself to a cause, Peretz
is no more interested in reasonable objections to his preferred option
of airstrikes than he is in the evidence that the Iranian people might
very well be on course to doing away with the mullahs themselves. The
Iranians, he would have us believe, will always act against us, and
without cause, and so the only solution is for us to act against them,
and without hesitation. He is either unaware or unimpressed that our
nation's previous interferences with Iran have almost always resulted
in damage to that nation's democratic institutions and the advancement
of its religious zealots and secular thugs. Presumably, he does not
find any lessons in the shameful conduct of the CIA in the early '50s,
during which time that viper's nest spearheaded the overthrow of Iran's
democratically-elected prime minister through disinformation campaigns,
financial aid to fascist politicians, and strategic support for known
gangster Shaban Jafari, among other things; all of this is now publicly
acknowledged by our own government and detailed with charming precision
in our national archives. That these prior interferences, so much akin
in spirit to the proposals now being made by our modern-day hawks,
subsequently resulted in a quarter-century of dictatorship by a
degenerate shah; that this state of affairs was followed by a
predictable backlash whereby most any thug who promised to stand up to
the U.S. was given a place in the new regime; and that this final
revolution produced the very government that is now causing us so much
trouble, does not seem to strike Peretz as relevant or even worthy of
mention.
Likewise, Peretz has no interest in the real
significance of the 2009 election and its aftermath - that the majority
of the Iranian people are today desirous of securing their own liberty
and improving their material circumstances, that they will tomorrow be
capable of seizing these things, and that the sooner this is
accomplished, the sooner will they be inclined to give up such
distractions as anti-Israeli sentiment in favor of their own pursuit of
happiness. Reducing the possibility of an Iranian attack against Israel
is Peretz's reasonable objective, and here we have a viable and moral
way by which to accomplish this - one which will bear the added
legitimacy of having been carried out by the Iranians themselves. But
Peretz is not interested in solving the problem so much as he is in
solving the problem in a particular way - one that is risky, will
almost certainly result in civilian casualties, and which will provide
a theocratic regime with the opportunity to redirect public anger from
itself to the U.S. and thereby increase its own legitimacy in the eyes
of many Iranians. Simply stated, Peretz seeks to solve a problem in a
manner that will almost certainly end up exacerbating it. ***
Peretz on His Various Enemies
Yes, let me assure you, this hater of Israel [Princeton professor Richard Falk] is a Jew. And, also yes,
this hater of America is an American. They are one and the same
individual. So Wikipedia begins its narrative with the simple
characterization, 'Jewish American.' No one will claim him, perhaps
not even his mother. But that I don't know.
-
Martin Peretz, April 2008
If you or I decided to accuse someone of possessing some sort of
negative trait, we would probably begin by finding one or more
occasions on which the person in question had exhibited that trait.
Aside from helping us to back up our assertion, such instances would
also present the added bonus of helping us to ensure that our attack is
warranted. If we're especially honest, we might also pause a moment to
consider whether other people who we're in the habit of defending do
not also bear this particular trait, in which case our especial honesty
might prompt us to either acknowledge that this is the case or scrap
our objection altogether lest we give the impression that our enemies
are in some unusual habit not found among our allies. Peretz rarely
gets past the first of these tasks. But you and I are quite alike, it
seems. And the smell of you intoxicates me.
Whereas you
and I, united together in sexual tension and civic virtue, would never
attack a fellow citizen without having first done our due diligence,
Peretz does this to such a great and perpetual extent that one might
reasonably guess that such things get him high, just like you get me
high when I take in the sight of you, when I gaze upon your eyes gazing
into mine.
At the time when Peretz was among the few to have
gotten the Iranian election story wrong, Juan Cole was among the many
who got it right; though fraud was apparent to many from the beginning,
the author and Middle East expert did more than his part in identifying
specific instances of electoral regularities on a region-to-region basishttp://www.juancole.com/2009/06/stealing-iranian-election.html .
That Cole has in this and other instances displayed a specified working
knowledge of the Middle East far beyond anything Peretz has ever shown
does not seem to have deterred the publisher from launching such
uncoordinated attacks as this:
For Cole, though a popular
blogger, is certainly not sensible and he has, on many issues, kept
himself acidulously ill-informed. Smart he is, however, though mostly
in his efforts to get to the top of the heap of popular experts about
the Arabs.http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_spine/archive/2009/02/08/the-search-for-consolation.aspx "Smart he is, gurgle blargle blarg comma comma comma." Fucking abominable.
Peretz is also in the habit of targeting New York Times columnist
Nicholas Kristoff for special criticism, apparently because Kristof has
failed to target the Arabs for same. Having once begun a blog post by
conceeding that Kristof himself was among those who first brought
attention to the Darfur genocide, Peretz immediately noteshttp://www.tnr.com/blog/the-spine/convictionless-kristof that he "can't
recall whether Kristof has ever noted the overwhelming Arab backing for
these heinous deeds." This would be a reasonable thing for Peretz to
have written had he written it from some 19th century Montana
homestead. Insomuch as that Peretz actually exists among us in this
very time and place, he could have Googled "Kristof," "Sudan," and
"Arabs," like I did, and found that Kristof had indeed called out the
Arabs on Darfur less than a month before Peretz had called out Kristoff
for not calling out the Arabs on Darfur. Specifically, Kristof had
written the following:
Unfortunately, the Arab Leagues secretary general, Amr Moussa, who
quite properly denounces abuses when suffered by Palestinians, has
chosen to side with Mr. Bashir rather than the hundreds of thousands of
Muslims killed in Darfur. If Israel bombed some desert in Darfur, Arab
leaders might muster some indignation about violence there.
Kristof 1, Arabs 0! Aside from wondering aloud whether or not Kristof
had ever noted Arab complaisance regarding Darfur when he could have
looked that up in something under 30 seconds by way of supertechnology,
Peretz goes on to imply further degrees of fascist-coddling on the part
of the columnist, noting that two TNR staffers who helped to advance
the Darfur story are in possession of some insight into the situation
that Kristof lacks:
Just and Reeves do not believe the the United Nations is able or, for
that matter, willing to do what needs to do be done to stop the
killing. After all, China and Russia are structurally empowered to
block any constructive moves on the matter by virtue of their veto
rights on the Security Council.
It is fantastic that Just and Reeves understand this very obvious
thing, but Peretz's implication that Kristof does not is, as usual,
totally insane and retarded. In the very same column in which he'd
taken issue with the Arabs on Darfur - the column he'd written just a
month before, I will note again for emphasis - Kristof asserted that
the Chinese must be compelled to cease supplying weaponry to the
antagonists and summarised the situation as follows:
If China continues it is the main supplier of arms used in the
genocide then it may itself be in violation of the 1948 Genocide
Convention... Incredibly, China and Russia are acting as Mr. Bashirs lawyers,
quietly urging the United Nations Security Council to intervene to
delay criminal proceedings against him. Such a delay is a bad idea,
unless Mr. Bashir agrees to go into exile.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/opinion/17kristof.html
Kristof, then, knows every bit as well as Just and Reeves and Peretz do
that the UN is worthless and that the Russian and Chinese regimes don't
give a shit about the well-being of Africa's rural animists, although
this does not deter Peretz from implying otherwise, as Peretz is an
unstoppable force that cannot be deterred by anything.
The
occasion for the bizarre criticisms we've just examined was a more
recent Kristof column to the effect that, although Kristof eats meat,
he suspects that history will judge meat eaters very poorly from some
vantage point in the future. Based on such an irritatingly
introspective and self-critical little essay as this, full of hemming
and hawing about all the poor little animals, Peretz concludes that
Kristof "has the vanity of the absolutely righteous." One might wish
that Kristof had any such thing, but clearly he does not.
Peretz has elsewhere gotten after journalist Roger Cohen, not to be confused with mediocre Washington Post columnist
Richard Cohen. Journalist Roger Cohen, as we'll go ahead and call him,
is attacked in a Peretz post that begins thusly:
Roger Cohen has the Times beat in Iran. Well, not exactly. No one has the Times
beat in Iran. I don't know how many Western newspapers have their own
journalists in the country. I do know that the FT does but it is an
Iranian who holds it. Anyway, the datelines from Iran are commonly from
Arab capitals, mostly Beirut.
Note that this is how Martin Peretz begins an essay. Do you see now
that we must all arm ourselves? Do you understand what is at stake? He
goes on to explain:
Cohen's standards for an evil regime are quite specific and tough. He
will not judge Tehran harshly until it murders many many Jews.
Many many many. Peretz also asks, more in sadness than in curiositty:
So how has Cohen dealt with the torments to which hundreds of thousands of Iranians have been treated since the election?
This
seems to be a hypothetical question in that Peretz does not answer it
or even suggest that such a thing can have an answer. He does
subsequently admit that an analogy he had just made himself two
paragraphs back in which he'd compared Iran to Nazi Germany might be "a
bit overwrought, although I'm not at all sure it is." Which is to say,
I guess, that he doesn't admit it. Anyway, we do not get answer as to
how this Iranian regime-loving journalist deals with the crackdown on
protesters in that country. If we had, we would have learned that Cohen
has dealt with it by reporting on it, decrying it, and otherwise doing
everything it is that a journalist can do short of shooting someone or
rescuing a brilliant scientist from the clutches of an evil generalhttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/opinion/18iht-edcohen.html :
The Islamic Republic has lost legitimacy. It is fissured. It will not
be the same again. It has always played on the ambiguity of its nature,
a theocracy where people vote. For a whole new generation, theres no
longer room for ambiguity.
Cohen
goes on to rail against the regime in flamboyant and irritating terms
of the sort that he probably would not have sent to his editor were he
a marijuana smoker, in which case he would have almost certainly
realized that the entire column was kind of ostentatious and stupid. "A nation has stirred," he tells us, shamelessly. "Provoked, it has risen." Die.
The point is that Peretz has once again wrongly criticized yet another
columnist. He's going to keep doing that throughout this whole section.
That's what this section is about.
Peretz is so intemperate
as to have even made several strange attacks on staffers of his own
magazine on such occasions when they've written articles he deems
incompatible with his own hodgepodge foreign policy.