chapter

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-

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:

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:

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.

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.)

      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 suppose 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 demonstrated does not seem to have deterred our antihero from menacing the scholar with the following interconnected array of specified symbols which may very well

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 comma blargle comma blarg comma 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 points outhttp://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 and had no legs. Insomuch as that Peretz actually exists among us in the dawn of the information age, he could have Googled "Kristof," "Sudan," and "Arabs," like I did, and found that Kristof had indeed called out the Arabs on their collective complacency regarding Darfur less than a month before Peretz had called out Kristoff for not calling out the Arabs on their collective complacency regarding Darfur. One doesn't even need legs to do this sort of research; otherwise I wouldn't have done it. I haven't left my apartment in weeks. Frankly, I hope I die right here in this room, preferably before I get around to researching and writing the chapter on Ruben Navarrate, who wrote a whole book about how he's Hispanic and he went to Harvard and how important that is and how we should all drop what we're doing and read his little book about how he's a Hispanic who went to Harvard.

   So, a month before the point at which Peretz couldn't recall if Kristof had written anything like the following, 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 21st century super-science, Peretz goes on to imply further degrees of fascist-coddling on the part of poor Kristoff, noting that two TNR contributors who also helped to bring attention to the Darfur story are in possession of some insight into the overall situation that Kristof allegedly lacks:

[Richard] Just and [Erick] Reeves do not believe the the [sic] 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 [hey, that was actually a pretty well-composed sentence].

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 here note again for emphasis - Kristof asserted that the Chinese must be compelled to cease supplying weaponry to the Sudanese antagonists and summarised the matter 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 in such cases as these and that the Russian and Chinese regimes are not particularly concerned 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.

This is how Martin Peretz chooses to begin 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 then asks us the following question, presumably more out of sadness than anger or honest curiosity:

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 that he doesn't actually admit it. What? We do not get any answer as to how this mullah-loving journalist deals with the crackdown on protesters in that country. If we had asked someone who bothers to read the work of those whose work he claims ought not to be read, 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 thousands of
Basij paramilitaries or rescuing a brilliant scientist from the clutches of an underground prison complex and then having him invent a nanovirus that kills all the remaining Basij paramilitariesAnyway, wa http://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 terminology of the sort that he probably would not have submitted to his editor were he a marijuana smoker, in which case he would have almost certainly realized for himself that the entire column was kind of ostentatious and stupid. "A nation has stirred," he announces, shamelessly. "Provoked, it has risen." It is Jesus, Emperor of Persia. The point is that Peretz has once again wrongly criticized yet another columnist for having not done something that he did in fact do. 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 attacked staffers of his own magazine on such occasions as they've written articles he deems incompatible with his personal hodgepodge foreign policy. In August of 2008, Peretz denounced TNR contributor John Judis for having written that the U.S.'s late-20th century dealings with Cuba are comparable to Germany's early-20th century dealings with Belgium; Judis was referring in this case to Imperial Germany. "(I can't believe that even he would compare us to the Nazis)," Peretz mused, both parenthetically and in italics. He must have thought this to be a devastating combination around about the moment in which he ought to have been thinking about whether or not it was likely that anyone would single out Belgium as having been the most memorable national victim of Nazi Germany.

    Still, Judis did compare the U.S.'s approach towards Cuba to that of the German Empire towards Belgium as well as to that of Iraq towards Kuwait, and such an argument certainly merits a counterargument based in historical fact and context. Peretz . He begins his screed against the journalist with "John Judis has often had a soft spot for America's enemies" and ends it with the following prepositional experiment: "There is nothing less than Henry Wallace, doughface tripe." There is how Peretz writes when he's particularly angry with nothing less than tripe. There is how it seems to me, at least.

   A few hours after having written his nonsense, Peretz apologized for the outburst. "There is great embarrassment for me," he wrote. Just kidding. Here's the real apology, inserted as an update to the blog post in question:

Judis' item obviously upset me. And I have had my differences with John over the years. (As you know, I revel in intellectual give-and-take) But re-reading this item a few hours later, I realize that my rhetoric was a bit too rough. Since our disagreements are fierce, I wish my language had been less angry.

    I wish his language had been Mandarin so that I wouldn't have had to learn from Peretz that Peretz "revel[s] in intellectual give-and-take" and that everyone is aware of this. Also note how he's managed to screw up yet another parentheses.

    Among Peretz's various insane rhetorical assaults on his superiors, one finds a pattern of hypersensitivity to criticism of U.S. foreign policy both past and present. To the publisher's credit, this almost certainly stems from his long and reasonable opposition to those among the Old Left whose philosophical degeneracy led them to sympathize with the Soviet Union and its hangers-on over the United States and the other relatively free nations of the world. But most of these people are either dead or living in San Miguel de Allende, and their modern counterparts have descended into even greater irrelevancy than even the dead ones, if not the ones who are residing in San Miguel.

    I shall make a self-indulgent aside because there is no one here to stop me. My grandma used to live in San Miguel, and when I was fifteen or so I made the acquaintance of several of these elderly and two-dimensional creatures. One of them explained to me over breakfast that the Aztecs knew perfectly well that Hernan Cortez was not actually some deity, but rather just a greedy Spaniard, and that they were simply being nice when they allowed him to seize control of the country. Another trapped me in her apartment and forced me to listen to recordings of Lenny Bruce, whom she had apparently known well and probably fucked. On another occasion, two of these obsolete old crones argued over whether or not one can find orange cats in Rome; one them claimed that Rome has no orange cats at all, and the other claimed to have owned one herself while living in that very city. One group of them eventually had another other group arrested over a dispute involving control of the local library. If only there were a metaphor in there somewhere. At any rate, I managed to steal a lot of pain pills in those days.

    Peretz, then, is right to keep an eye on whatever manifestations of Old Left sentiment might arise in the pages of the The New York Times Review of Books or Unitarian churches. The difficulty here is that he cannot differentiate between Bolshevik propaganda and reasonable historical analysis. In 2006, writer James Carroll, being a writer, wrote an article for The Boston Globe in which he argued that the North Korean dystopia came about in part as a reaction to the U.S.'s involvement in the peninsulahttp://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/10/16/the_makings_of_a_nuclear_standoff/ . He did not argue, incidentally, that North Korea is the glowing sun of harmony to which all faces turn from every corner of the Earth, its children looking to Kim Jong Il for hope and guidance as they struggle against the dog monsters who burn them for fuel in the factories of the West.

   But you wouldn't know this from reading Peretz's take on the piece. Carrol, it seems, "didn't tell his readers that the present communist tyrant Kim Jong Il is the son of the last communist tyrant Kim Il Jong, who ran the tyranny in 1948." There is a good reason for Carrol not to have done so, even aside from the fact that Kim Jong Il's father was not the non-existent Kim Il-Jong but rather Kim Il-Sung: the vast majority of people who would be inclined to read an article on some subset of 20th century Korean history are fully aware that the current ruler is the son of the previous one and that this might very well reflect poorly on the regime's commitment to popular governance.