How not to review a book

If you'd like to see how NOT to review a book, check out Leon Wieseltier's review of Nicholson Baker's new novel, "Checkpoint," in Sunday's New York Times Book Review. "Checkpoint," in case you haven't heard, is apparently a gambol inside the head of someone who wants to shoot President Bush over the War in Iraq.



Like it or not, for the last forty years, assassination has been a tragically recurrent theme in American political and public life. Assassination--strangely clumped on the liberal-reformer part of the continuum, don'tcha know?--has shaped all our lives, mostly for the worse. As we approach another Presidential election, the most contentious one of my lifetime, I think the persistent American impulse towards political violence is a legitimate topic for a serious novel. Thus, it deserves serious treatment in a review inside the paper of record.



I haven't read "Checkpoint," nor have any great desire to do so. Nor do I espouse assassination as a political tactic, sadly effective though it may sometimes be. Think this country would be a bit different if JFK, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, MLK, and RFK had lived? Those, my friends, are just the greatest hits of a single decade. Once again, like it or not, assassination is as American as baseball, and the only way to minimize its effects is by acknowledging its possibility, as uncomfortable as it might be to do so.



Wieseltier, who is the fiction editor for The New Republic, begins his review from a position of revulsion for the novel--"This scummy little book"-- then, halfway through, as if the reviewer couldn't bear to discuss the book any longer--the review jettisons "Checkpoint" entirely, and devolves into an impassioned plea for liberal levelheadedness. "In this season of ferocity," Weiseltier writes, "it is worth insisting that Bush-hatred is generally not a plot to kill the president." The only rational response to this statement is: Yes, Leon, most people--even those who despise Bush--will not entertain shooting him. Who are you trying to reassure? Does Leon Wieseltier want to shoot President Bush?



I'm kidding, of course. If Wieseltier wants to write an article about how American liberals aren't well served by aping the well-worn right-wing tactics of demagoguery, I'm sure there's a case to be made, and plenty of places for him to sell that. But in the meantime, he should let somebody actually review Baker's book. It is precisely our current season of ferocity that makes "Checkpoint" germane.



But the portion that made me blog was this:

"The opinion that these are not normal times, that the Bush years are apocalyptic years, is quite common," Wieseltier writes, as if this were the fruit of some sorrowful mass delusion on the part of average Americans hankering for more eventful lives. If any group is responsible for the Bush years being perceived as apocalyptic, it's the Bush Administration, with its evangelical President determined to cast the war on terror as a personalized, epochal gunfight between Jesus and Allah. Or perhaps it's their manipulation of mass fear; liberals were not the ones conjuring up images of "a mushroom cloud" in the wake of 9/11, to gin up support for a war. The Bush Administration have unleashed powerful emotions for their own use and benefit, but once the genies of fear and righteousness are conjured, they move as they wish. They lodge in unpredictable places, and that's why politicians should be wary of using them. Oswald came from the Cold War; Sirhan from the festering Arab/Israeli conflict; Ray from the cauldron of American race relations. Ferocious times, indeed.



Back to Wieseltier: ''We are no longer in the ordinary times we were in when the conservatives took out after Bill Clinton,' Janet Malcolm recently explained in a letter to this newspaper. 'We are in a time now that is as fearful as the period after Munich.' Life in South Egremont, Mass., may be excruciating, but Malcolm's knowledge of the period after Munich has plainly grown dim."



Feeling superior is great sport--for people like Wieseltier, it's probably their main sustenance--but even the basest clod could see what Malcolm meant by her comment: the period before the unleashing of a great evil. "Munich, see lessons of," is bandied about constantly on the right and the left, and insisting that Malcolm hold to its precise meaning after sixty years of use as cultural shorthand is infantile. Has Bush's war in Iraq unleashed a great evil, as Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia ushered in the Second World War? We don't know yet, can't know yet. But I'm not particularly bothered by the overstatement of the threat; better to overestimate the danger, and fix it in November, than to shoehorn our irresponsible rush to war into politics-as-usual because we cannot psychologically handle the alternative. Now may not be Munich, but it ain't Pleasantville, either.



Wieseltier again: "And who, in her ominous analogy, is Hitler? If it is Osama bin Laden, then she might have a little sympathy for the seriousness of this administration about American security, whatever her views about some of its policies. If it is George W. Bush. . . . "



"If it is Osama..." What coy bushwa--if the Bush Administration were protecting the US with appropriate seriousness (to use LW's word), our soldiers would be at home searching container ships, not over in Iraq. It is precisely Bush's lack of seriousness regarding the task at hand that makes most of the people in this country distrust him so.



Obviously, Bush is not Hitler--they are two individuals shaped by and shaping two different eras--but the idea that Bush's tactics have been Hitlerian is so repugnant, so beyond the pale to Wieseltier, that he cannot even bring himself to type it. And yet, who can deny that Bush has constantly returned to the politics of "fer us or agin us" patriotism; that he constantly invokes the security of the homeland as a rationale for every political manuever; that he represents a radical outgrowth of a fringe segment of our country; that he appears to use fear as a governing tool; that he has sought to roll back civil liberties in the name of expedience; and so on. Hitler comparisons may be common currency on the Internet, but Bush has done what he has done, and needs to be seen for what his actions have shown him to be: at best incompetent, at worst, undemocratic.



And my final bit of Leon for the evening, still speaking of poor Janet Malcolm's letter to the Times: "Well, she continues: 'Those of us who are demonizing George W. Bush are doing so not because of his morals but because we are scared of what another four years of his administration will do to this country and to the world.' So whether or not Bush is Hitler, he is a devil. This is what now passes for smart."



And this is what now passes for book reviewing. Nicholas Kristof says we shouldn't call Bush a liar, even though he lies. Now Leon Wieseltier says we shouldn't hate Bush, no matter what he does, because that makes us like the right-wingers. What softheaded nonsense! The only rational thing to do is judge Bush on his statements, actions, and effects. If he lies, he's a liar. If he's despicable, despise him. Or not--but the psychological needs of the pundit class shouldn't enter into it. "Don't call Bush a liar because that makes me uncomfortable"; "Don't write about assassinating the President because that makes me uncomfortable." Jeez--stop writing for the Times, guys, and get a therapist. Maybe if you both see the same one, she'll give you a bulk discount.