crytical

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered how I might have fared had I chosen a different career (as a physicist, which was my first preference when I was a child) in which I could truly stand on the shoulders of giants, rather than economics, where I’ve had to stand on the toes of pygmies

New Yorker

Neocons on a Cruise: What Conservatives Say When They Think We Aren’t Listening
By Johann Hari, Independent UK
Posted on July 17, 2007, Printed on July 21, 2007

I am standing waist-deep in the Pacific Ocean, both chilling and burning, indulging in the polite chit-chat beloved by vacationing Americans. A sweet elderly lady from Los Angeles is sitting on the rocks nearby, telling me dreamily about her son. “Is he your only child?” I ask. “Yes,” she says. “Do you have a child back in England?” she asks. No, I say. Her face darkens. “You’d better start,” she says. “The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they’ll have the whole of Europe.”
I am getting used to these moments – when gentle holiday geniality bleeds into… what? I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, ” Of course, we need to execute some of these people,” I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. “A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country,” she says. “Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that’s what you’ll get.” She squints at the sun and smiles. ” Then things’ll change.”
I am travelling on a bright white cruise ship with two restaurants, five bars, a casino – and 500 readers of the National Review. Here, the Iraq war has been “an amazing success”. Global warming is not happening. The solitary black person claims, “If the Ku Klux Klan supports equal rights, then God bless them.” And I have nowhere to run.
From time to time, National Review – the bible of American conservatism – organises a cruise for its readers. I paid $1,200 to join them. The rules I imposed on myself were simple: If any of the conservative cruisers asked who I was, I answered honestly, telling them I was a journalist. Mostly, I just tried to blend in – and find out what American conservatives say when they think the rest of us aren’t listening.
From sweet to suicide bomber
I arrive at the dockside in San Diego on Saturday afternoon and stare up at the Oosterdam, our home for the next seven days. Filipino boat hands are loading trunks into the hull and wealthy white folk are gliding onto its polished boards with pale sun parasols dangling off their arms.
The Reviewers have been told to gather for a cocktail reception on the Lido, near the very top of the ship. I arrive to find a tableau from Gone With the Wind, washed in a thousand shades of grey. Southern belles – aged and pinched – are flirting with old conservative warriors. The etiquette here is different from anything I have ever seen. It takes me 15 minutes to realise what is wrong with this scene. There are no big hugs, no warm kisses. This is a place of starchy handshakes. Men approach each other with stiffened spines, puffed-out chests and crunching handshakes. Women are greeted with a single kiss on the cheek. Anything more would be French.
I adjust and stiffly greet the first man I see. He is a judge, with the craggy self-important charm that slowly consumes any judge. He is from Canada, he declares (a little more apologetically), and is the founding president of “Canadians Against Suicide Bombing”. Would there be many members of “Canadians for Suicide Bombing?” I ask. Dismayed, he suggests that yes, there would.
A bell rings somewhere, and we are all beckoned to dinner. We have been assigned random seats, which will change each night. We will, the publicity pack promises, each dine with at least one National Review speaker during our trip.
To my left, I find a middle-aged Floridian with a neat beard. To my right are two elderly New Yorkers who look and sound like late-era Dorothy Parkers, minus the alcohol poisoning. They live on Park Avenue, they explain in precise Northern tones. “You must live near the UN building,” the Floridian says to one of the New York ladies after the entree is served. Yes, she responds, shaking her head wearily. “They should suicide-bomb that place,” he says. They all chuckle gently. How did that happen? How do you go from sweet to suicide-bomb in six seconds?
The conversation ebbs back to friendly chit-chat. So, you’re a European, one of the Park Avenue ladies says, before offering witty commentaries on the cities she’s visited. Her companion adds, “I went to Paris, and it was so lovely.” Her face darkens: “But then you think – it’s surrounded by Muslims.” The first lady nods: “They’re out there, and they’re coming.” Emboldened, the bearded Floridian wags a finger and says, “Down the line, we’re not going to bail out the French again.” He mimes picking up a phone and shouts into it, “I can’t hear you, Jacques! What’s that? The Muslims are doing what to you? I can’t hear you!”
Now that this barrier has been broken – everyone agrees the Muslims are devouring the French, and everyone agrees it’s funny – the usual suspects are quickly rounded up. Jimmy Carter is “almost a traitor”. John McCain is “crazy” because of “all that torture”. One of the Park Avenue ladies declares that she gets on her knees every day to ” thank God for Fox News”. As the wine reaches the Floridian, he announces, “This cruise is the best money I ever spent.”
They rush through the Rush-list of liberals who hate America, who want her to fail, and I ask them – why are liberals like this? What’s their motivation? They stutter to a halt and there is a long, puzzled silence. ” It’s a good question,” one of them, Martha, says finally. I have asked them to peer into the minds of cartoons and they are suddenly, reluctantly confronted with the hollowness of their creation. “There have always been intellectuals who want to tell people how to live,” Martha adds, to an almost visible sense of relief. That’s it – the intellectuals! They are not like us. Dave changes the subject, to wash away this moment of cognitive dissonance. “The liberals don’t believe in the constitution. They don’t believe in what the founders wanted – a strong executive,” he announces, to nods. A Filipino waiter offers him a top-up of his wine, and he mock-whispers to me, “They all look the same! Can you tell them apart?” I stare out to sea. How long would it take me to drown?
“We’re doing an excellent job killing them.”
The Vista Lounge is a Vegas-style showroom, with glistening gold edges and the desperate optimism of an ageing Cha-Cha girl. Today, the scenery has been cleared away – “I always sit at the front in these shows to see if the girls are really pretty and on this ship they are ug-lee,” I hear a Reviewer mutter – and our performers are the assorted purveyors of conservative show tunes, from Podhoretz to Steyn. The first of the trip’s seminars is a discussion intended to exhume the conservative corpse and discover its cause of death on the black, black night of 7 November, 2006, when the treacherous Democrats took control of the US Congress.
There is something strange about this discussion, and it takes me a few moments to realise exactly what it is. All the tropes that conservatives usually deny in public – that Iraq is another Vietnam, that Bush is fighting a class war on behalf of the rich – are embraced on this shining ship in the middle of the ocean. Yes, they concede, we are fighting another Vietnam; and this time we won’t let the weak-kneed liberals lose it. “It’s customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who’s ‘we’?” the writer Dinesh D’Souza asks angrily. “The left won by demanding America’s humiliation.” On this ship, there are no Viet Cong, no three million dead. There is only liberal treachery. Yes, D’Souza says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, “of course” Republican politics is “about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers.”
The panel nods, but it doesn’t want to stray from Iraq. Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: “The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You’d think we’re the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren’t covered. We’re doing an excellent job killing them.”
Then, with a judder, the panel runs momentarily aground. Rich Lowry, the preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of National Review, says, “The American public isn’t concluding we’re losing in Iraq for any irrational reason. They’re looking at the cold, hard facts.” The Vista Lounge is, as one, perplexed. Lowry continues, “I wish it was true that, because we’re a superpower, we can’t lose. But it’s not.”
No one argues with him. They just look away, in the same manner that people avoid glancing at a crazy person yelling at a bus stop. Then they return to hyperbole and accusations of treachery against people like their editor. The ageing historian Bernard Lewis – who was deputed to stiffen Dick Cheney’s spine in the run-up to the war – declares, “The election in the US is being seen by [the bin Ladenists] as a victory on a par with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We should be prepared for whatever comes next.” This is why the guests paid up to $6,000. This is what they came for. They give him a wheezing, stooping ovation and break for coffee.
A fracture-line in the lumbering certainty of American conservatism is opening right before my eyes. Following the break, Norman Podhoretz and William Buckley – two of the grand old men of the Grand Old Party – begin to feud. Podhoretz will not stop speaking – “I have lots of ex-friends on the left; it looks like I’m going to have some ex-friends on the right, too,” he rants -and Buckley says to the chair, ” Just take the mike, there’s no other way.” He says it with a smile, but with heavy eyes.
Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11 American conservatism, and they stare at wholly different Iraqs. Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who travelled through a long phase of left-liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America’s power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is a bristling grey ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been “an amazing success.” He waves his fist and declaims: “There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria … This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn’t have gone better.” He wants more wars, and fast. He is “certain” Bush will bomb Iran, and ” thank God” for that.
Buckley is an urbane old reactionary, drunk on doubts. He founded the National Review in 1955 – when conservatism was viewed in polite society as a mental affliction – and he has always been sceptical of appeals to ” the people,” preferring the eternal top-down certainties of Catholicism. He united with Podhoretz in mutual hatred of Godless Communism, but, slouching into his eighties, he possesses a world view that is ill-suited for the fight to bring democracy to the Muslim world. He was a ghostly presence on the cruise at first, appearing only briefly to shake a few hands. But now he has emerged, and he is fighting.
“Aren’t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?” Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. “No,” Podhoretz replies. “As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf War I, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran.” He says he is “heartbroken” by this ” rise of defeatism on the right.” He adds, apropos of nothing, “There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we’re winning.” The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn’t he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley “a coward”. His wife nods and says, ” Buckley’s an old man,” tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.
I decide to track down Buckley and Podhoretz separately and ask them for interviews. Buckley is sitting forlornly in his cabin, scribbling in a notebook. In 2005, at an event celebrating National Review’s 50th birthday, President Bush described today’s American conservatives as “Bill’s children”. I ask him if he feels like a parent whose kids grew up to be serial killers. He smiles slightly, and his blue eyes appear to twinkle. Then he sighs, “The answer is no. Because what animated the conservative core for 40 years was the Soviet menace, plus the rise of dogmatic socialism. That’s pretty well gone.”
This does not feel like an optimistic defence of his brood, but it’s a theme he returns to repeatedly: the great battles of his life are already won. Still, he ruminates over what his old friend Ronald Reagan would have made of Iraq. “I think the prudent Reagan would have figured here, and the prudent Reagan would have shunned a commitment of the kind that we are now engaged in… I think he would have attempted to find some sort of assurance that any exposure by the United States would be exposure to a challenge the dimensions of which we could predict.” Lest liberals be too eager to adopt the Gipper as one of their own, Buckley agrees approvingly that Reagan’s approach would have been to “find a local strongman” to rule Iraq.
A few floors away, Podhoretz tells me he is losing his voice, “which will make some people very happy”. Then he croaks out the standard-issue Wolfowitz line about how, after September 11, the United States had to introduce democracy to the Middle East in order to change the political culture that produced the mass murderers. For somebody who declares democracy to be his goal, he is remarkably blasé about the fact that 80 per cent of Iraqis want US troops to leave their country, according to the latest polls. “I don’t much care,” he says, batting the question away. He goes on to insist that “nobody was tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo” and that Bush is “a hero”. He is, like most people on this cruise, certain the administration will attack Iran.
Podhoretz excitedly talks himself into a beautiful web of words, vindicating his every position. He fumes at Buckley, George Will and the other apostate conservatives who refuse to see sense. He announces victory. And for a moment, here in the Mexican breeze, it is as though a thousand miles away Baghdad is not bleeding. He starts hacking and coughing painfully. I offer to go to the ship infirmary and get him some throat sweets, and – locked in eternal fighter-mode – he looks thrown, as though this is an especially cunning punch. Is this random act of kindness designed to imbalance him? ” I’m fine,” he says, glancing contemptuously at the Bill Buckley book I am carrying. “I’ll keep on shouting through the soreness.”
The Ghosts of Conservatism Past
The ghosts of Conservatism past are wandering this ship. From the pool, I see John O’Sullivan, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher. And one morning on the deck I discover Kenneth Starr, looking like he has stepped out of a long-forgotten 1990s news bulletin waving Monica’s stained blue dress. His face is round and unlined, like an immense, contented baby. As I stare at him, all my repressed bewilderment rises, and I ask – Mr Starr, do you feel ashamed that, as Osama bin Laden plotted to murder American citizens, you brought the American government to a stand-still over a few consensual blow jobs? Do you ever lie awake at night wondering if a few more memos on national security would have reached the President’s desk if he wasn’t spending half his time dealing with your sexual McCarthyism?
He smiles through his teeth and – in his soft somnambulant voice – says in perfect legalese, “I am entirely at rest with the process. The House of Representatives worked its will, the Senate worked its will, the Chief Justice of the United States presided. The constitutional process worked admirably.”
It’s an oddly meek defence, and the more I challenge him, the more legalistic he becomes. Every answer is a variant on “it’s not my fault” . First, he says Clinton should have settled early on in Jones vs Clinton. Then he blames Jimmy Carter. “This critique really should be addressed to the now-departed, moribund independent counsel provisions. The Ethics and Government [provisions] ushered in during President Carter’s administration has an extraordinarily low threshold for launching a special prosecutor…”
Enough – I see another, more intriguing ghost. Ward Connerly is the only black person in the National Review posse, a 67-year-old Louisiana-born businessman, best known for leading conservative campaigns against affirmative action for black people. Earlier, I heard him saying the Republican Party has been “too preoccupied with… not ticking off the blacks”, and a cooing white couple wandered away smiling, “If he can say it, we can say it.” What must it be like to be a black man shilling for a magazine that declared at the height of the civil rights movement that black people “tend to revert to savagery”, and should be given the vote only “when they stop eating each other”?
I drag him into the bar, where he declines alcohol. He tells me plainly about his childhood – his mother died when he was four, and he was raised by his grandparents – but he never really becomes animated until I ask him if it is true he once said, “If the KKK supports equal rights, then God bless them.” He leans forward, his palms open. There are, he says, ” those who condemn the Klan based on their past without seeing the human side of it, because they don’t want to be in the wrong, politically correct camp, you know… Members of the Ku Klux Klan are human beings, American citizens – they go to a place to eat, nobody asks them ‘Are you a Klansmember?’, before we serve you here. They go to buy groceries, nobody asks, ‘Are you a Klansmember?’ They go to vote for Governor, nobody asks ‘Do you know that that person is a Klansmember?’ Only in the context of race do they ask that. And I’m supposed to instantly say, ‘Oh my God, they are Klansmen? Geez, I don’t want their support.’”
This empathy for Klansmen first bubbled into the public domain this year when Connerly was leading an anti-affirmative action campaign in Michigan. The KKK came out in support of him – and he didn’t decline it. I ask if he really thinks it is possible the KKK made this move because they have become converted to the cause of racial equality. “I think that the reasoning that a Klan member goes through is – blacks are getting benefits that I’m not getting. It’s reverse discrimination. To me it’s all discrimination. But the Klansmen is going through the reasoning that this is benefiting blacks, they are getting things that I don’t get… A white man doesn’t have a chance in this country.”
He becomes incredibly impassioned imagining how they feel, ventriloquising them with a shaking fist – “The Mexicans are getting these benefits, the coloureds or niggers, whatever they are saying, are getting these benefits, and I as a white man am losing my country.”
But when I ask him to empathise with the black victims of Hurricane Katrina, he offers none of this vim. No, all Katrina showed was “the dysfunctionality that is evident in many black neighbourhoods,” he says flatly, and that has to be “tackled by black people, not the government. ” Ward, do you ever worry you are siding with people who would have denied you a vote – or would hang you by a rope from a tree?
“I don’t gather strength from what others think – no at all,” he says. “Whether they are in favour or opposed. I can walk down these halls and, say, a hundred people say, ‘Oh we just adore you’, and I’ll be polite and I’ll say ‘thank you’, but it doesn’t register or have any effect on me.” There is a gaggle of Reviewers waiting to tell him how refreshing it is to “finally” hear a black person “speaking like this”. I leave him to their white, white garlands.
“You’re going to get fascists rising up, aren’t you? Why hasn’t that happened already?”
The nautical counter-revolution has docked in the perfectly-yellow sands of Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, and the Reviewers are clambering overboard into the Latino world they want to wall off behind a thousand-mile fence. They carry notebooks from the scribblings they made during the seminar teaching them “How To Shop in Mexico”. Over breakfast, I forgot myself and said I was considering setting out to find a local street kid who would show me round the barrios – the real Mexico. They gaped. “Do you want to die?” one asked.
The Reviewers confine their Mexican jaunt to covered markets and walled-off private fortresses like the private Nikki Beach. Here, as ever, they want Mexico to be a dispenser of cheap consumer goods and lush sands – not a place populated by (uck) Mexicans. Dinesh D’Souza announced as we entered Mexican seas what he calls “D’Souza’s law of immigration”: ” The quality of an immigrant is inversely proportional to the distance travelled to get to the United States.”
In other words: Latinos suck.
I return for dinner with my special National Review guest: Kate O’Beirne. She’s an impossibly tall blonde with the voice of a 1930s screwball star and the arguments of a 1890s Victorian patriarch. She inveighs against feminism and “women who make the world worse” in quick quips.
As I enter the onboard restaurant she is sitting among adoring Reviewers with her husband Jim, who announces that he is Donald Rumsfeld’s personnel director. “People keep asking what I’m doing here, with him being fired and all,” he says. “But the cruise has been arranged for a long time.”
The familiar routine of the dinners – first the getting-to-know-you chit-chat, then some light conversational fascism – is accelerating. Tonight there is explicit praise for a fascist dictator before the entree has arrived. I drop into the conversation the news that there are moves in Germany to have Donald Rumsfeld extradited to face torture charges.
A red-faced man who looks like an egg with a moustache glued on grumbles, ” If the Germans think they can take responsibility for the world, I don’t care about German courts. Bomb them.” I begin to witter on about the Pinochet precedent, and Kate snaps, “Treating Don Rumsfeld like Pinochet is disgusting.” Egg Man pounds his fist on the table: ” Treating Pinochet like that is disgusting. Pinochet is a hero. He saved Chile.”
“Exactly,” adds Jim. “And he privatised social security.”
The table nods solemnly and then they march into the conversation – the billion-strong swarm of swarthy Muslims who are poised to take over the world. Jim leans forward and says, “When I see these football supporters from England, I think – these guys aren’t going to be told by PC elites to be nice to Muslims. You’re going to get fascists rising up, aren’t you? Why isn’t that happening already?” Before I can answer, he is conquering the Middle East from his table, from behind a crème brûlée.
“The civilised countries should invade all the oil-owning places in the Middle East and run them properly. We won’t take the money ourselves, but we’ll manage it so the money isn’t going to terrorists.”
The idea that Europe is being “taken over” by Muslims is the unifying theme of this cruise. Some people go on singles cruises. Some go on ballroom dancing cruises. This is the “The Muslims Are Coming” cruise – drinks included. Because everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. Everyone dreams it. And the man responsible is sitting only a few tables down: Mark Steyn.
He is wearing sunglasses on top of his head and a bright, bright shirt that fits the image of the disk jockey he once was. Sitting in this sea of grey, it has an odd effect – he looks like a pimp inexplicably hanging out with the apostles of colostomy conservatism.
Steyn’s thesis in his new book, America Alone, is simple: The “European races” i.e., white people – “are too self-absorbed to breed,” but the Muslims are multiplying quickly. The inevitable result will be ” large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015″ as Europe is ceded to al Qaeda and “Greater France remorselessly evolve[s] into Greater Bosnia.”
He offers a light smearing of dubious demographic figures – he needs to turn 20 million European Muslims into more than 150 million in nine years, which is a lot of humping.
But facts, figures, and doubt are not on the itinerary of this cruise. With one or two exceptions, the passengers discuss “the Muslims” as a homogenous, sharia-seeking block – already with near-total control of Europe. Over the week, I am asked nine times – I counted – when I am fleeing Europe’s encroaching Muslim population for the safety of the United States of America.
At one of the seminars, a panelist says anti-Americanism comes from both directions in a grasping pincer movement – “The Muslims condemn us for being decadent; the Europeans condemn us for not being decadent enough.” Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz’s wife, yells, “The Muslims are right, the Europeans are wrong!” And, instantly, Jay Nordlinger, National Review’s managing editor and the panel’s chair, says, ” I’m afraid a lot of the Europeans are Muslim, Midge.”
The audience cheers. Somebody shouts, “You tell ‘em, Jay!” He tells ‘em. Decter tells ‘em. Steyn tells ‘em.
On this cruise, everyone tells ‘em – and, thanks to my European passport, tells me.
From cruise to cruise missiles?
I am back in the docks of San Diego watching these tireless champions of the overdog filter past and say their starchy, formal goodbyes. As Bernard Lewis disappears onto the horizon, I wonder about the connections between this cruise and the cruise missiles fired half a world away.
I spot the old lady from the sea looking for her suitcase, and stop to tell her I may have found a solution to her political worries about both Muslims and stem-cells.
“Couldn’t they just do experiments on Muslim stem-cells?” I ask. ” Hey – that’s a great idea!” she laughs, and vanishes. Hillary-Ann stops to say she is definitely going on the next National Review cruise, to Alaska. “Perfect!” I yell, finally losing my mind.
“You can drill it as you go!” She puts her arms around me and says very sweetly, “We need you on every cruise.”
As I turn my back on the ship for the last time, the Judge I met on my first night places his arm affectionately on my shoulder. “We have written off Britain to the Muslims,” he says. “Come to America.”

Thanks Vonnie

Outspoken writer who captured the violence and unpredictability of life in Argentina
Loud-mouthed, provocative, often downright rude, the writer Rodolfo Fogwill was a legendary figure in recent Argentinian literature. Fogwill, who has died aged 69, from pulmonary emphysema, probably exacerbated by his inveterate chain-smoking, quarrelled with everybody, was intolerant of any writing or behaviour that in his view smacked of political correctness or pretension, and yet wrote some of the most resonant short stories and novels in Argentina of the past 30 years.
The story surrounding the way he wrote one of his most important novels, Los Pichiciegos (1983), is typical. The book was a protest at the horror of the war fought between Britain and Argentina over the Malvinas/Falkland islands in the South Atlantic, and at the stupidity of war in general. Fogwill claimed to have written the book in six days during June 1982, while the war was still going on, keeping himself going with vast amounts of cocaine and whisky.
A brilliant description of life underground during the conflict, Fogwill stressed that the book was above all a “mental experiment”. “I knew how cold it was down there from my sailing days,” he said. “I knew about youngsters because I had several of my own. I knew about the Argentine army because I did national service. Out of this I constructed a fictional experiment that was much closer to reality than if they had sent me to the islands with a tape recorder and a camera.”
The novel (which I translated with Amanda Hopkinson) was his only work published in Britain, by Serpent’s Tail in 2007, which gave it the title Malvinas Requiem, rather than its literal translation, The Armadillos. This enraged Fogwill, who saw it as lending a sanctimonious touch to what he wanted to be a condemnation of all ideologies in favour of the dreadful demands made of terrified youngsters on both sides of the war, whose only wish was to survive and get home safely.
Born in Bernal, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Fogwill tried to convince me his surname was English, claiming he had ancestors in Fox Hill, in Sussex. An only child, he studied medicine and sociology at the University of Buenos Aires. He began teaching there, but fell foul of the military regime that took power in 1966. “I was sacked for being a communist, the worst insult imaginable for the Trotskyist I was at the time.”
This reversal took him into the world of advertising, where, he claimed, he made and lost several fortunes. His work again caused him problems during the military dictatorship at the end of the 1970s, when the authorities accused him of sending a subliminal message to a banned leftwing group in a TV commercial he had produced. The authorities closed his bank accounts and arrested him for “economic subversion”. Thrown into jail, he could not pay his debts, and so eventually was tried for fraud.
When he came out, he wrote a story, Muchacha Punk (Punk Girl), which won a prize and led him to dedicate himself to literature. He founded his own publishing company, Tierra Baldía (Waste Land), where he published his poetry and stories, as well as that of young Argentine poets such as Osvaldo Lamborghini and Néstor Perlongher, and then began to write his own novels.
After Los Pichiciegos, which had to wait until the fall of the dictatorship to be published, Fogwill went on to produce around 20 books of novels and short stories, in which he successfully captured the violence and unpredictability of life in Argentina in the 80s-90s. His pronouncements on literature were always trenchant: “To write seems to me easier than trying to avoid the feeling of meaninglessness that not writing brings”; or “Literature doesn’t tell stories, but ways to tell stories”. His own preferred novels were Los Pichiciegos, Vivir Afuera (Living Outside, 1998) and En Otro Orden de Cosas (Something Else, 2004), the last of which won him the Argentinian national prize for literature.
Convinced that hypocrisy, double-dealing and empty populist slogans were what undermined Argentine society, he said exactly what he thought on every occasion. Over the years, he managed to fall out with almost everybody in the Argentinian literary world and beyond – though many young Argentinian writers have said how generous he could be in helping them in their careers.
He was married and had five children.
Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, writer, born 15 July 1941; died 21 August 2010
Guardian

Tree of Life Web Project

I Did Not Misunderestimate Tony Abbott – A Reply To The Australian Spectator

With the Coalition gaining a 3% swing in the poll, many of its supporters are enjoying a ‘told ya so’ moment about the electability of Tony Abbott. James Paterson (not the thriller writer) brought them all together in an article for the Oz Spectator, rounding up the usual suspects. Your correspondent was surprised and pleased to be included:
And Crikey’s resident angry former Marxist, Guy Rundle, after comparing Abbott to Taliban leader Mullah Omar… …boasted that ‘vanquishing Abbott shouldn’t be too hard’ because Abbott is ‘a weird little creep’ who would destroy himself without much help.
Please because at least someone is paying attention (former Marxist?), surprised because taken out of full context the quote is exactly the opposite of what I suggested. Here’s the full quote:
The possession of an idea of politics, of what it is as a distinct activity, has thus given Abbott an instant towering quality, compared to the people around him. Turnbull, Hockey, Nelson — these were political kalkitos figures. Remember Kalkitos? Those transfer figures —   soldiers, astronauts etc — that you attached to a cardboard landscape with a pencil? That’s been the Liberal Party for two years. Abbott is no kalkitos, and he may well give the party a sense of purpose and forward motion. But he will do so from the deep wellsprings of his own politics, of a sense — literal or otherwise — that the world is simply a shadow of a deeper order….
…With the election of Abbott, Labor has no choice but to make this a fight between modernity and its other….That shouldn’t be too hard, if Labor maintains a positive message about modernity, hope and possibility, and what a weird little creep Abbott ultimately is.
‘towering quality…purpose and forward motion…deep wellsprings….’, yeah I really underestimated that guy, didn’t I? My point was that Labor, using intelligence, grace and wit, should have drawn all Abbott’s weirder attitudes out – not as the main game, but as a side issue that put him on the defensive.
My one error was to say that shouldn’t be too hard – but that was not because I underestimated Abbott, but overestimated Labor (merely saying that Labor has a pulse would have been to overestimate them). What could Keating or Hawke, with Watson, Freudenburg, Ellis etc etc have done with Abbott’s remark about his daughters’ virginity? A direct assault wouldn’t work, but four well-placed jokes could have had people snickering every time Abbott posed with near teenage girls. At that point, Abbott could have announced a cure for cancer, and no-one would have noticed. As with ‘can a souffle rise twice’ and ‘I want to do you slowly’, a single well-chosen line would have resituated Abbott entirely.
Why didn’t Labor do that? Because they would have had polling that nine people and a cane toad in Queensland think Jesus rode a dinosaur to church,and might not attacks on Abbott’s medieval Christianity. But that’s the whole point of humour. It allows you to say something while not doing so. Humour is the way you bring voters over the line – making it impossible for them to vote for your opponent, because they simply can’t take her/him seriously, even if they feel closer to your opponent’s politics
Strategically, this inability to stitch Abbott up – as a religious conservative of a European reactionary type, as an essentially un-Australian figure – was one key reason why Labor couldn’t lay a glove on him. Given that they didn’t have stability or incumbency as much of a backstop, you would have thought that painting Labor as, in the last analysis, the sane party, would have been one useful substitute.
But doing that would have required some breadth of knowledge, and Labor’s new supremos know nothing except numbers and polling – the not un-useful set of techniques that, when raised to the status of politics tout court, become a self-defeating pseudo-science. Politics will always be an art, not a science, and the character of an art is that the skills it demands can never be reduced to a series of methods. Labor’s hacks have reduced their party to this pathetic state because it’s all they know, and encouraging any other methods would endanger their control of it, retention of which they regard as a higher priority than winning.
So I over-rated Labor, but I never underestimated Abbott. Labor never estimated him at all. I dont know what any of them did for the first two weeks of the campaign, maybe they were still on holiday. Two fourteen year olds riffing at a bus-stop could have got Abbott’s measure, but it well beyond Labor’s collective wit.
Meanwhile, I stand by my assessment that Abbott has some fatal speck of narcissism that will never allow him to give of his all – hence the botched health debate early on, hence the botched broadband thing on 7.30 Report, and the ongoing botching of negotiations with the rural independents,the doubty three. The one thing he could fix by simple hard work – debate and interview prep, mastery of the details – he flubs. Why? Because it’s the one thing that’s most flubbable. You simply don’t do the work, and then you say …’man, if I’d done the work, I would have nailed it. Now we’ll never know.’ Should his sloppy and evasive work on costings give the doubty three the pretext to back Labor, he can then sail back into Opposition with that tune ringing in his head. If he ever manages to fix this tic, he’ll be unbeatable – should his divided party give him a second chance (and of course by next week he may be PM).
But as bad as this would be for Abbott, it would be catastrophic for his fan club in the commentariat. While Abbott draws his strength from the Holy Trinity (Santamaria, George Pell and Christopher Pearson), they – dispirited cosmopolitans with a right-wing branding – draw their strength from Abbott. They don’t partake of his medieval mind-set, but they’re glad someone does, it’s a last resort gold standard for the deflated currency of their ideas. Should he remain opposition leader, hoping for a governmental collapse, he will do so under a bad sign, that of being Gillard’s bitch, Holofernes to her Judith. Should he vacate the leadership – well, who else is there? And where would he go? And what will become of poor old James Paterson and Tom ‘Heidi’ Switzer, who warm their chapped hands by the glow of his burning zeal?

Nobel-Winning British Scientist Accused Of Spying By Mi5, Papers Reveal

Professor Maurice Wilkins won a Nobel prize for his pioneering work on the DNA double helix. Photograph: National Archives/PA
A British scientist who won a Nobel prize for his pioneering work on the DNA double helix was investigated by MI5 as a possible atom spy who had passed US nuclear secrets to the Russians.
The security service files released today at the National Archives show that New Zealand-born Professor Maurice Wilkins had worked during the second world war on the Manhattan Project, building the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
In 1951, the FBI told MI5 that one of the nine Australian and New Zealand scientists had been in close contact with members of the American Communist party.
Wilkins was put under surveillance, with his post opened and movements tracked. But the only evidence against him was from a junior MI5 officer who had been with Wilkins at St Andrews University when the first of the atom spies, Dr Allan Nunn May, had been uncovered in 1946. Wilkins had known May personally and defended his action as justifiable.
The investigation was dropped in 1953 when his colleagues insisted that any leftwing sympathies had disappeared. “He comes to the college every morning with a copy of the the Times, which he has apparently read on the journey,” said MI5′s informant.
Guardian

The Warmest Year Yet, Says Nasa
LONDON: The global temperature this year reached its warmest on record based on a 12-month rolling average, said James Hansen, the top climate change scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The mean surface temperature in the year to April was about 0.66 degrees warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. That makes it a fraction warmer than the previous peak in 2005.
”Record high global temperature during the period with instrumental data was reached in 2010,” Dr Hansen and three co-authors wrote. ”As for the calendar year, it is likely that the 2010 global surface temperature in the analysis also will be a record.”
The figures strengthen the case that temperatures show a warming in the climate. The NASA data series uses information from 6300 monitoring stations around the world and is one of the three main gauges of global temperature used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to compile its assessments.

Australia has earned the dubious honour of being in the top 10 countries with the worst environmental impact on the planet, according to a major international study of more than 200 nations.
The report challenges the idea that high levels of wealth, education and access to non-polluting technology lead to better environmental results. The more money citizens have, the more they damage they do, the study suggests.
Researchers from the Adelaide University, National University of Singapore and Princeton University in the US measured forest and habitat loss, species extinction, greenhouse gas emissions, fisheries and fertiliser use.
”It’s a very attractive hypothesis, that as nations become richer they become more environmentally aware and their impact starts to decline,” Professor Corey Bradshaw, of the environment institute at Adelaide University, told the Herald. ”It makes people feel good about being wealthy. But we looked hard for any evidence of the theory, and we didn’t find it.”
Australia was ranked ninth in the list of nations for its absolute impact on the natural world, a ranking derived by cross-referencing data from the United Nations, the World Bank and the World Resources Institute.
The list was headed by Brazil which, though a developing country, has stewardship over land clearing in most of the Amazon rainforest.
On a per capita basis, Singapore was classified as the world’s worst offender, followed by South Korea, Qatar, Kuwait and Japan.
The report, published in the Public Library of Science journal, noted that the high representation of Asian countries in its list of poor performers was ”striking”.
It suggested this could be explained by the fact that Europe and North America had been developed for longer, meaning much of the land clearing and species extinction had already taken place there.
The report came as the UN released its own summary of the impact of climate change on Africa, concluding that progress in food security and poverty reduction was likely to be overturned as the continent heats up.
Countries ranked by the scale of their total negative impact on the environment.
1 Brazil
2 United States
3 China
4 Indonesia
5 Japan
6 Mexico
7 India
8 Russia
9 Australia
10 Peru
Source Unknown

‘Zombie Ants’ Controlled By Parasitic Fungus For 48M Years

A carpenter ant (Camponotus leonardi) whose body has been consumed by the fungus Ophiocordyceps. Photograph: David P Hughes
The oldest evidence of a fungus that turns ants into zombies and makes them stagger to their death has been uncovered by scientists.
The gruesome hallmark of the fungus’s handiwork was found on the leaves of plants that grew in Messel, near Darmstadt in Germany, 48m years ago.
The finding shows that parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control the creatures they infect in the distant past, even before the rise of the Himalayas.
The fungus, which is alive and well in forests today, latches on to carpenter ants as they cross the forest floor before returning to their nests high in the canopy.
The fungus grows inside the ants and releases chemicals that affect their behaviour. Some ants leave the colony and wander off to find fresh leaves on their own, while others fall from their tree-top havens on to leaves nearer the ground.
The final stage of the parasitic death sentence is the most macabre. In their last hours, infected ants move towards the underside of the leaf they are on and lock their mandibles in a “death grip” around the central vein, immobilising themselves and locking the fungus in position.
“This can happen en masse. You can find whole graveyards with 20 or 30 ants in a square metre. Each time, they are on leaves that are a particular height off the ground and they have bitten into the main vein before dying,” said David Hughes at Harvard University.
The fungus cannot grow high up in the canopy or on the forest floor, but infected ants often die on leaves midway between the two, where the humidity and temperature suit the fungus. Once an ant has died, the fungus sprouts from its head and produces a pod of spores, which are fired at night on to the forest floor, where they can infect other ants.
Scientists led by Hughes noticed that ants infected with the fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, bit into leaves with so much force they left a lasting mark. The holes created by their mandibles either side of the leaf vein are bordered by scar tissue, producing an unmistakable dumb-bell shape.
Writing in the journal, Biology Letters, the team describes how they trawled a database of images that document leaf damage by insects, fungi and other organisms. They found one image of a 48m-year-old leaf from the Messel pit that showed the distinctive “death grip” markings of an infected ant. At the time, the Messel area was thick with subtropical forests.
“We now present it as the first example of behavioural manipulation and probably the only one which can be found. In most cases, this kind of control is spectacular but ephemeral and doesn’t leave any permanent trace,” Hughes said.
“The question now is, what are the triggers that push a parasite not just to kill its host, but to take over its brain and muscles and then kill it.”
He added: “Of all the parasitic organisms, only a few have evolved this trick of manipulating their host’s behaviour.
Why go to the bother? Why are there not more of them?”
Scientists are not clear how the fungus controls the ants it infects, but know that the parasite releases alkaloid chemicals into the insect as it consumes it from the inside.
Ian Sample The Guardian

Boom, bust and then what? Larry Elliott on three different theories
It’s been said before, but the real divide in the post-financial crisis world is not between Keynesians and monetarists, or between free-marketeers and interventionists, but between Tiggers and Eeyores. Tiggers believe that what capitalism does is bounce, and it will quickly learn the lessons of the past three years to re-emerge stronger than ever. The Eeyores, by contrast, believe there is a dark thundercloud to every silver lining, with the upturn of the past year or so merely interrupting the long and painful adjustment to past excesses.
Anatole Kaletsky is as Tiggerish as they come. In Capitalism 4.0, he explains how the near-death experience of the western banking system in the autumn of 2008 will hasten the arrival of the fourth variant of capitalism since the dawn of the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century. Capitalism 1, the era of laissez faire and small government, ended with the Wall Street crash and the great depression of the 1930s. The next 40 years were marked by Capitalism 2, the decades of Keynes and Beveridge, when it was thought the state could do no wrong. That model crashed and burned during the stagflation of the 1970s, to be replaced by Thatcher, Reagan and the belief during the years of Capitalism 3 that the state could do no right.
The market fundamentalist model, Kaletsky argues, has now run into the sand and will be replaced by Capitalism 4.0, an acceptance that both markets and governments are prone to error. Pragmatism will replace free-market ideology, the right lessons will be learned, and the long post-cold-war upswing will resume after a fairly brief interlude. Kaletsky is relatively kind to the banks and saves his real venom for Henry Paulson, the former Goldman Sachs chief executive who was US Treasury secretary during the crisis. It was the failure of Paulson, steeped in the anti-government culture of Capitalism 3, to rescue Lehman Brothers in September 2008 that turned a “fairly normal boom-bust cycle into the greatest financial crisis of all time”.
If all this sounds a little bit too good to be true, that’s because it almost certainly is. For a start, the development of industrial capitalism since 1750 can’t really be divided into the neat segments that Kaletsky describes. There was a big role for the market during Capitalism 2, just as the state was still a big player in economic life during Capitalism 3. More fundamentally, the book seems to assume a seamless transition to Capitalism 4; given the power of those with a vested interest in the continuation of the status quo, especially in the City, that looks highly improbable.
That said, Kaletsky’s core argument – that capitalism has shown amazing flexibility and adaptability – is right. As you would expect from one of Britain’s best columnists, his book is cogent, readable and thoroughly enjoyable.
Stephen D King (Losing Control, Yale University Press, £20) the global chief economist at HSBC, is more of an Eeyore. Like Kaletsky, he accepts that the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 coupled with the digital revolution have changed the world. But he is much less sanguine about where globalisation is heading, fearing that the developed nations are set for a battle for resources and influence with the emerging powers of Asia and Latin America. It is a battle the west might not win.
While Kaletsky identifies innovation and adaptability as the reasons for the success of the western capitalist model, King says market forces appeared to work well in the developed world in part because they were not allowed to work elsewhere. “In the 19th century, western nations rigged market rules to suit themselves, whether through acts of protectionism, drug-trafficking or the law of the gunboat. Through much of the 20th century, experiments with Marxist-Leninism kept many nations in the economic deep freeze, even as the developed nations flourished.”
King’s argument is that markets are amoral, so while they may deliver efficient outcomes there is no guarantee that the rewards will be fairly distributed. And since the west is fast losing its ability to rig markets in its own interests, that amorality risks becoming a significant problem, creating resentment among the losers from globalisation. This, King says, could manifest itself in protectionism or a hostility to immigration.
Those wondering whether a City analyst can write a book for a lay audience should be reassured. Like Kaletsky, King writes fluently and well, pepping up his argument with entertaining anecdotes and little-known facts. Clearly, after the flurry of somewhat breathless “fly-on-the-wall” accounts of the banking crisis, publishers are looking for authors who can hazard a guess as to what is going to happen next. Philippe Legrain’s Aftershock (Little, Brown, £12.99) is another entrant into this increasingly crowded market, and is the least satisfying of the three books here. That’s not for the want of trying; Legrain has a solution to every one of the problems exposed by the credit crunch, and then some. The book, though, lacks a unifying theme and tends to bludgeon the reader into submission with reams of statistics. But Eeyores can cheer themselves up with the Kaletsky; while King will provide a dose of realism for the Tiggers.
Guardian