RUTHFULLY YOURS

Joseph Roth has emerged as one of the greatest, certainly the most prescient, of the German writers of the entre-deux-guerres. If Thomas Mann achieved wider renown, it was due in good part to his performance as the aloof man of letters. Writing to Stefan Zweig in 1933, Roth was typically irreverent: “I have never cared for Thomas Mann’s way of walking on water. He isn’t Goethe . . . . [He] has somehow usurped ‘objectivity’. Between you and me, he is perfectly capable of coming to an accommodation with Hitler . . . . He is one of those people who will countenance everything, under the pretext of understanding everything”.

By contrast, The Hotel Years – an anthology of Roth’s shorter journalism, collected and translated by Michael Hofmann – includes a gentle pen portrait, from 1937, of Franz Grillparzer. Composed in Parisian destitution, it demonstrates how Roth came to treasure the irretrievable civilities of the old Europe. Of the Austrian playwright’s single meeting with Goethe, he observed, “It was like a Friday going out to see what a Sunday is like and then going home, satisfied and sad that he was Friday”. In Roth’s case, exile and penury bestowed sorry radiance on the lost world of the shtetl in which the impoverished Ost- Juden had no occasion for alien affectations; unashamed thieves, smugglers, tricksters and whores nurtured no illusions, as Western Europe’s haute Juiverie did, of exemption from malice. Whether their obituarist in Weights and Measures (1937) would ever have been happy actually living among them is another matter.

Roth was the first novelist to mention Adolf Hitler’s name in print, as far back as 1923. The view from the street, if not yet the gutter, allowed him to see it all coming. The Radetsky March (1932) – named after “the Marseillaise of reaction” – is now recognized as a classic elegy for Emperor Franz Josef’s vanished supremacy. During its author’s lifetime, however, a lack of fame was always the spur. Without his prodigious facility for writing feuilletons for the liberal press, Roth would have been unable to make a living from his pen.

In case you were just enjoying the weekend with your family and not listening to the news, the world changed over the past 48 hours.

The United States has now officially become a Banana Republic.

In sweeping moves that gave the lie to repeated assertions by Secretary of State John Kerry that there would be no “comprehensive” deal with Iran, the United States on Saturday gave Iran a clean bill of nuclear health, lifted sanctions on more than 400 Iranian government entities and individuals, and swapped U.S. citizens held hostage by Iran for Iranian nationals convicted of violating U.S. export control laws.

There was so much news over the weekend that the media has had a hard time keeping up. But not your government, which has been beavering away so they could trade away our sovereignty, our legal system, and our national security interests at the stroke of a pen.

The Treasury Department has been working for months to draft a package of implementing regulations for Obama’s ill-conceived nuclear deal. The thicket of U.S. sanctions on Iran has become so dense over the years that Treasury had to post a separate web page with a guide to sanctions relief, which was split among eight separate statements.

My favorite was a list of 400 Iranian state entities now removed from U.S. sanctions. I had been tracking many of those companies for years.

From the opening image of Spike Lee’s new movie Chi-Raq – a red, white, and blue map of the United States composed entirely of the silhouettes of a variety of guns – it is clear that the filmmaker intends to take on the volatile issue of blacks and gun violence in war-torn Chicago, nicknamed Chi-Raq by its black inhabitants after the Middle Eastern war zone. Lee has a habit of provoking racial controversy, and that is no less true of this darkly humorous satire (“not a comedy,” he insists) set in the murder capital of the United States. True to the director’s form, Chi-Raq provokes and dissatisfies those on both sides of the debate.

Spike Lee has attacked both white and black fellow filmmakers in the past for reasons related to race. As noted in his profile at the Freedom Center’s Discover the Networks resource site, Lee excoriated Tyler Perry for the stereotyped depictions of black characters in his hugely popular comedies, and Woody Allen for not featuring enough black characters in his movies set in Manhattan. From his perspective that racism is deeply entrenched in American culture, the enormously wealthy Lee has railed against such issues as interracial couples, Charlton Heston and the NRA, NASCAR, the war in Iraq, the shooting of Michael Brown, and the gentrification of New York. He suspects the government of having engineered the AIDS epidemic and the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He has supported Barack Obama and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. He has stated that blacks can’t be racist, because they don’t have the political power to impose racism.

But interestingly, Chi-Raq doesn’t take an entirely expected position about blacks and gun violence. Lee could have made a movie about a white cop shooting an unarmed black man, which is the supposed epidemic ravaging the black American community; instead, he made a film that lays the responsibility for the high rate of black deaths annually from gun violence largely on the black community itself. Unlike the Black Lives Matter movement, Lee is willing to face the harsh reality of young black males perpetrating violence against other blacks.