RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his memoir Notes on a Century, Bernard Lewis observes that it has become “fashionable to assume that everything Western is bad”. Lewis, nonetheless, allows himself to make one “blatantly chauvinistic statement” by claiming that “the quest for knowledge” is a “peculiarly Western feature”. Throughout the past half-millennium, from the time of the earliest European Orientalists, the intellectual curiosity of Western philologists, adventurers and scholars has transcended provincialism, religion, sentiment and compliance. Notes on a Century goes a long way towards explaining why this phenomenon appears to be under threat, dwelling as we do in an era of “intellectual conformism unknown for centuries”.

Bernard Lewis, speaker of some thirteen languages, has been a leading Western authority on the Middle East for an astonishing seven decades, since the publication of The Origins of Ismailism in 1940: a colossus in his field, impossibly brilliant and an intellect of the highest order. The late Edward Said, one-time professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, described Lewis in 2003 as “a tireless mediocrity”. This says more about the founder of post-colonial studies than it does about his adversary. A more accurate description of Lewis was made by a Muslim critic in 1966: “[He is] either a candid friend or an honest enemy and in any case one who disdains to distort the truth.” Lewis, now ninety-five years old, wants to be regarded as a dedicated and single-minded scholar who successfully avoided the pitfalls of both polemics and apologetics. Despite (or perhaps because of) bouts of celebrity, and interludes as an adviser to various heads of state including the United States of America and Turkey, Lewis has his Western critics. Most—but certainly not all—hail from the ranks of post-colonial studies.

One of the best books I’ve read this past year is “Dear America: Who’s Driving the Bus?” by Linda Goudsmit (Contrapoint Publishing). I would recommend it to anyone who wants to understand school shootings, millions of abortions, fatherless homes, the Deep State, today’s social chaos, and just about any other new millennium societal problem. I wish I had read the book before I married… certainly before I had children. It would be great input for a first-time voter, too.

As Goudsmit explains it, the “Bus” is you. It’s me. It’s the narcissistic amoral teenager who killed 10 and injured 10 people in Santa Fe, Texas last week; it is the narcissistic amoral teenager who has been charged with 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder in the February 14 shootings in Parkland, FL. Donald Trump, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and all familiar political names have a “Bus.” Each of the treasonous Deep State participants who think they know better than the people what’s good for America has a “Bus.” It is who is carried on each of our busses that make the Never Trumpers think they have the right to undo the results of a democratically-elected President and try to force him by crook and hook to leave office – a coup of which any third world dictator would approve. The “Bus” is each individual liberal who thinks decisions are best made with emotions rather than logical facts and truth — and the “Bus” is each conservative who disagrees.

Goudsmit explains that each of us carries within us the personal hurts and emotional traumas suffered at various times of our lives – mostly from childhood. These personalities, buried so deeply within each of us that they are often totally unknown to us, are passengers on our individual busses. We are unaware that these personalities live within us. When life circumstances create a mirror-like threat that shouts “danger” to one of these trauma-induced personalities from childhood, they often try to take control of the way in which we respond to the perceived threat. If our adult identity chooses to let the emotionally traumatized childhood personality dictate our response to the perceived threat, a child is driving our bus.

Conrad Black’s erudite biography of Donald J. Trump is different from the usual in mediis rebus accounts of first-year presidents. He avoids the Bob Woodward fly-on-the-wall unattributed anecdote, and “they say” gossip mongering. Nor is the book a rush-to-publish product from former insiders of the Trump campaign or administration. Instead, Black, a prolific and insightful historian, adopts the annalistic method in carefully tracing Trump’s earliest years in business through his various commercial misadventures, financial recoveries, and sometimes wild antics. Black’s aim is to illustrate how much of what Trump has done since announcing his presidential candidacy in summer 2015 is hardly mysterious. Instead, Trump’s methods are fully explicable by what he has always done in the past—in the sometimes troubling, but more often reassuring, sense.

Black is neither a hagiographer nor an ankle-biter. He seeks to understand Trump within the three prominent landscapes in which Americans had come to know their new president: politics, the celebrity world, and the cannibalistic arena of high-stakes Manhattan real estate and finance. Of the three, Black is most jaded about the anti-Trump hysteria within the first two, not because the real estate business is inherently a nobler profession, but because it more often lacks the moral preening and hypocrisies of both the beltway and tabloids. The result is an argument that the first president to have neither prior political nor military service nevertheless has his own demonstrable skill sets that are making his presidency far more dynamic than either his critics or supporters quite imagined. Black’s unspoken assumption is that it is more difficult to build a skyscraper in Manhattan than to be a career politician or an evening news reader.

In Trump’s rise and fall and rise as a billionaire, Black never whitewashes his ruthlessness, his fast and loose relationship with the truth (e.g., “He is not so much a cynic as a methodological agnostic, not a liar as much as a disbeliever in absolute secular truths”), and his occasionally tawdry P. T. Barnum hawking.

I first became aware of Tom Wolfe, who died Monday at 88, when an English teacher at my Jesuit high school in Maine turned me on to (classical reference in that phrase) his 1975 exercise in New Journalism, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”

Wow. I mean WOW! South Portland, Maine, had never encountered anything like it. Shakespeare, yes. Dante, but of course. Even a little Virgil and Descartes along the way. But this hypersonic chronicle about the novelist Ken Kesey (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and his Merry Pranksters motoring around California in a school bus decked out in Day-Glo psychedelic paint riding the ineffable wave of 1960s excess? That was something entirely new.

You’ll know one of Kesey’s slogans, which entered the language thanks to Wolfe: “You’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus.” I was decidedly on the Tom Wolfe bus.

Next up was “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” a collection of essays published a decade before “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Who knew that anyone could write with such serve, with SO MANY CAPITAL LETTERS and EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!? When you’re 16 and have been battened on “The Scarlet Letter” and Kipling’s “If,” it is both a revelation and an emancipation.

Maybe the question isn’t what happened to Alan Dershowitz.Maybe it’s what happened to everyone else.

NEW YORK — If you wanted to feel the full force of the intellectual whirlpool that is American politics in 2018, the place to go on February 25 was the Village Underground, a nightclub beneath East 3rd Street, where Alan Dershowitz, the longtime Harvard Law professor and civil liberties lion, was debating the future of American democracy on the side of President Donald Trump.

Opposing him were a National Review writer and a former FBI agent, arguing that the special investigation into ties between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign is well within the bounds of American law. Dershowitz, along with a conservative columnist for the Washington Examiner, was making the case that the Mueller investigation is dangerous to our entire system. In the room, which is normally a comedy club, it was impossible to shake the feeling that something was off. Two years ago, it would’ve seemed far more natural for the quartet to swap partners and switch sides.

On our way out, my wife and I were handed free copies of Dershowitz’s newest book, “Trumped Up: How Criminalization of Political Differences Endangers Democracy,” in which Dershowitz writes that special prosecutor Robert Mueller is subjecting Trump to “the legal equivalent of a colonoscopy.”

The woman behind us in line took her free book, turned to her husband and asked, “What happened to Alan Dershowitz?”

In certain circles—the legal academy, defense attorneys, Martha’s Vineyard—it is the question. Dershowitz, an iconic civil libertarian and criminal defense lawyer, who circulates between the liberal redoubts of Miami, New York and the Vineyard, has emerged in the past year as the most distinguished legal defender of Trump. He’s met Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and he dined with him at the White House the day after the FBI raid on Michael Cohen’s office. He’s a regular presence on TV, especially Fox News, where he’s a reliable voice on the president’s side against the investigation. In April, following the Cohen raid, Dershowitz appeared on “Hannity” nine times—including three days in a row. His message is clear: Mueller’s investigation is a witch hunt, and although he doesn’t think Trump should fire Mueller, the president would be within his rights to do it.

His analysis of the Navy’s shortcomings bore fruit nearly a century later.

It has been 99 years since Theodore Roosevelt’s death, yet he still captures Americans’ imaginations as much as any public figure from that era. What is often lost in our memory of Roosevelt is that he was not only a cowboy, a soldier, and a statesman, but also an acclaimed historian. Indeed, his historical scholarship (some of which remains the standard work in its field) is central to his legacy as a statesman.

Roosevelt was only 23 in 1882, when he published his first work of history, The Naval War of 1812. Although the book was well received in its time (every ship in the Navy was required to keep at least one copy on board), it is far more valuable today as a manifesto for American naval power and a clarion call for the modernization of what Roosevelt saw as a woefully ill-equipped fleet.

Roosevelt credits the young United States Navy with achieving several important victories against the British at sea, but this happened despite and not because of the actions of the American politicians who set military policy in the years before the war. During the Quasi-War fought between the United States and France in the late 1790s, President John Adams had ordered the construction of six frigates and created the Department of the Navy to oversee their construction. However, under the succeeding administrations of Jefferson and Madison, those ships fell into disrepair, and naval construction lost the importance it had once had in Washington. One can read the particular indignation Roosevelt has for Jefferson and Madison in the opening chapters of The Naval War of 1812, as he castigates their strategy for prioritizing small gunboats designed for coastal defense over larger frigates, and how this left the United States vulnerable to the much larger and more dangerous Royal Navy. While Roosevelt admires the quality of America’s sailors a great deal, he repeats vigorously that they were dealt a bad hand by inattentive politicians.

It might seem odd to say a book with the alarming title of “Suicide of the West” is an exhilarating call to arms in defense of what is highest and best in our civilization, but Jonah Goldberg’s extraordinary new bestseller is exactly that.

Goldberg says if we don’t veer from the cultural glide path we’re on, with both left and right committed to factually misleading and emotionally suppurating narratives about the innate cruelty and inborn injustice of this country, the greatest force for prosperity and freedom the world has ever known is likely to die. That is the “suicide” of Goldberg’s title.

But since this is something we’re doing to ourselves — a perverse effort to set fire to our own cultural patrimony — it’s also something we can correct.

The key factoid animating “Suicide of the West” is this: For 2,000 years, everywhere on earth, the large mass of humanity lived on the equivalent of $1.90 a day. “Near subsistence living,” Goldberg writes, “defined human habitats for almost all of human history.”

Then something happened. In the 18th century. In Great Britain. It was a complex phenomenon Goldberg calls the Miracle — a new way of thinking about humanity and human achievement and personal liberty that unlocked a hidden door in the possibilities of the species.

The results of the Miracle are astounding. Where once 94 percent of the people on earth survived on less than $2 a day, today only 9.6 percent does. “Around the world, the number of people considered poor has decreased both relatively and absolutely — an incredible feat, given massive increases in population,” Goldberg writes.

We have come to take most of this for granted, so much so that many of us believe the benefits of material prosperity are of little meaning because they’re not shared equally across all societies. We lament our failings rather than dwell on the astonishing fact that, as Goldberg puts it, “If the 200,000-year life span of homo sapiens were a single year, the vast majority of human economic progress would have transpired in roughly the last fourteen hours.”

Comprised of ninety-nine chapters, along with an Introduction, this latest book by Jewish feminist, academic and media commentator, Phyllis Chesler, A Family Conspiracy brings together material going back to 2004. The theme that binds all together is Chesler’s concern to bring into focus the phenomenon of “honor killing,” an extremely controversial term. For while it covers a variety of crimes against women perpetrated by families against their own mothers, wives and daughters with the spurious and vague rationalization of protecting or avenging the honor of the family, it is distinct from what is known as “domestic abuse” in westernized countries where such violence against women is against the law and not tolerated by the general public.

Domestic violence or the killing of wives, daughters and other women in the USA and Europe tends to occur randomly and usually against strangers. The more horrific the killing the less likely the perpetrator is to know his victim. When it is a matter of Muslim on Muslim, Sikh on Sikh or Hindu on Hindu murder, the crimes are well-planned out, carefully carried out by members of the family, and honored by the community. Honor killing is a form of social control overwomen and their bodies, a religious and customary or legal mode of punishment carried out on behalf of the whole community, and perceived as a necessary and virtuous act.

For 10 days, former FBI Director James Comey has been on a high-profile media tour to promote “A Higher Loyalty.” With more than 600,000 copies sold in the first week, the book leaves competing “resistance” favorites “What Happened” and “Fire and Fury” in the dust. But behind the aw-shucks, I-was-the-only-honest-man-in-the-room persona, Mr. Comey’s book demonstrates his real higher loyalty is to self-aggrandizement.

Consider two episodes from George W. Bush’s presidency. Mr. Comey writes that in 2003 he was drawn into the Valerie Plame investigation when administration officials leaked the identity of “a covert CIA employee,” allegedly as retaliation for a critical op-ed written by Ms. Plame’s husband. Mr. Comey, then deputy attorney general, appointed special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, and writes that he stands by the decision to charge Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, with false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice. Mr. Libby was convicted in 2007.

But vital facts are missing from Mr. Comey’s account. The most important is that no one revealed a covert CIA agent’s name. Though Mr. Comey refers to Ms. Plame seven times as a “covert agent,” she was not. That’s why Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who revealed Ms. Plame’s name to columnist Robert Novak, was never indicted.

Mr. Comey also fails to note that the star witness against Mr. Libby, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, recanted her testimony in 2015. She said Mr. Fitzgerald misled her and withheld exculpatory evidence that would have kept her from “unwittingly giving false testimony.” In a rebuke to Messrs. Fitzgerald and Comey, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals cleared Mr. Libby to practice law again in 2016, well before President Trump pardoned him earlier this month.