a berlin blog
|
a berlin blog |
|
|
Monday, November 17, 2003 Wolfowitz, Bloom, Bellow, BotsfordEvery so often I get a journal in the mail from Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford called News from the Republic of Letters. I'm a huge Bellow fan, and I wrote for Botsford once in Boston while he edited Bostonia. Their elderly mandarinism bugs me sometimes — I don't have any hope that Botsford would like my novel — but I respect both men as writers and thinkers. In their defunct journal Noble Savage they were among the first people to publish Thomas Pynchon. Now they're "a pair of utopian codgers," according to Bellow, who don't disagree in spirit with the neoconservatism associated with Allan Bloom and his Chicago friends. I think of them as the bohemian wing of the Bloom-style conservatives, or at least that's how Bellow styles himself in Ravelstein, his roman à clef about Bloom.Okay. Paul Wolfowitz was a student of Bloom's at Chicago. He makes an appearance (by phone) in Ravelstein. This little cameo belongs to his legend. The Economist has mentioned it; so have certain neocon hawks — as if getting noticed by a great American novelist added to his Washington cachet. So it was nice to read in the latest Republic of Letters about a fissure between those free-thinking utopian codgers and Wolfowitz as a Washington figure. Botsford writes, in his pungent, ever-sniffy column, "Pierre Bayle's Notebook": "Of course I am as much horrified by the latest load of bright young (and middle-aged) men who seem to be hi-jacking my own (as well as another) country. To show you how primitive is my sense of politics, I have only to reveal my two means of judgment. With certain misdemeanors I advocate exile rather than punishment. O.J., Bill Clinton and countless CEOs should be packed aboard a jumbo and flown to some remote land with golf courses and beaches and an amiable climate to frolic for the rest of their natural lives. We don't need their kind here. "Of course, if they had any sense of shame they would long ago have left themselves. For Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and company, my test is even simpler: I don't want people in politics whom I would not invite to dinner." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:03 PM | |
|
|
 Too Much of Nothing, a novel  Politics and Prose  about our editor 
The Underground Grammarian  current Berlin blog page  |
