Noted Here and There ...
In the Guardian, Sir Martin Gilbert, historian of Israel and biographer of Winston Churchill, is comparing and contrasting George Bush and Tony Blair with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Thanks to Stephen Tootle at Big Tent for the tip.
Ed Cohn at Gnostical Turpitude recommends two thoughtful essays at The American Prospect.
Michael Lind, author of Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics, argues that the history of American party systems is the record of one party adopting an anti-war, reformist stance and finding its base narrowed to New England. Federalists, National Republicans, and Whigs followed that trail, says Lind, who asks"Are the Democrats next?"
David Greenberg of Rutgers reviews several books on mid-twentieth century American liberalism from the New Deal to Kingman Brewster and Eugene McCarthy.
Kevin Holtsbury at Collected Miscellany recommends Randy Boyagoda's review of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America for The New Pantagruel. I hardly know where to begin with the commendations here: to The New Pantagruel, that bills itself as"hymns in a whorehouse," or with Boyagoda, who spots the"two-page single paragraph meditation on the double meaning of Americans ‘being Jews.' Through punishing prose," says Boyagoda,
Roth rejects God, rejects synagogue, rejects race, rejects ancient language, rejects schmaltzy ethnic pride — rejects most every imaginable source and standard for a people's self-definition, save one. At the end of this streaking comet of a passage, this is where we land:"Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American.""Is this Philip Roth, or Dr. Phil?" Boyagoda asks. Is this Roth, the great American novelist; or Dr. Phil, memorably tagged the" corpulent gasbag" by Derek Catsam at Rebunk?
To be Jewish is to be yourself? To be American is to be yourself? No further commitments, obligations, virtues, histories, traditions needed? Just be yourself? At the core of this moving, horrifying book, the intellectual formulation of Jewish and American identity proves to be a puddle of drippy, 21st century identity-speak. In vain does one search this late fiction from a great American writer, from perhaps the great Jewish American writer, for finer knowledge of what American Jews drew on when they were expelled from their innocent Garden State, into a stars-and-stripes-and-swastikas desert.Argue with Boyagoda, if you will. His literary criticism won't let us off the hook with sappy answers to difficult issues.
Finally, in"Eggheads Naughty Word Games," John Strausbaugh reports on the usual MLA silliness for the New York Times.