Bobby Kennedy was one of the tragic heroes of my youth: along with many others, I invested a lot of hope in him. I’m old enough, though, to have outgrown the idea that, magically, he would have spared us the agonies of Vietnam had he not been murdered in 1968.

The Kennedy myth no longer holds its power over me, but David Brooks ($$) reminded me of something I’d forgotten—Bobby Kennedy’s love of the Greek classics, developed after Jackie Kennedy gave him Edith Hamilton’s book The Greek Way to read in March 1964.

“The Greek Way” contains essays on the great figures of Athenian history and literature, and Kennedy found a worldview that helped him explain and recover from the tragedy that had befallen him. “When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view,” Hamilton writes, “then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.”

Classical scholars often scorn Hamilton because she wrote in a breathless “all the glory that was Greece” mode, but her book changed Robert Kennedy’s life. He carried his beaten, underlined and annotated copy around with him for years, pulling it from his pocket, reading sections aloud to audiences in what Thomas calls “a flat, unrhythmic voice with a mournful edge.”

Kennedy found in the Greeks a sensibility similar to his own — heroic and battle-scarred but also mystical. He shared the awful sense of foreboding that pervades the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and that distinctly Greek awareness of the invisible patterns that connect events to one another, how the arrogance men and women show at one moment will twist back and bring agony later on.

I don’t know if there’s any connection here, but, well, lately I’ve been thinking that our adversaries and opponents in the Middle East have been acting as if democracy were some kind of Trojan Horse and they’re saying: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.” ***
In a manner of speaking, of course.

—-

***see also this post

It’s fascinating to read the many viewpoints people are imposing on the film.

Joe Queenan thinks Sacha Baron Cohen is a typical British twit seething with anti-Americanism, that the film is “contemptible,” and that the feminist brigade will soon go gunning for him:

Most of the critics who salivated all over Borat were male, as film criticism is dominated by middle-aged men whose darkest fear is to no longer be perceived as cutting-edge by equally lonely men who write blogs. Similarly, most of the people who have made Borat such a monstrous hit were young men. But eventually the women will be heard from, and a lot of them will not be fawning Baron Cohen groupies. To the women I know, when you ridicule redneck racists, you are a hero. [hmm. really? and that's okay?--ed.] But when you go out of your way to humiliate middle-aged feminists and harmless socialites and hapless hotel employees and office workers on their lunch breaks, and use plump black women as a running sight gag, you expose yourself not as an iconoclastic wit, but as a pig.

Meanwhile, Down Under, Christopher Scanlon zeroes in on the (supposedly) anti-Kazakh angle. He even cites Slovenian Lacanian sociologist/cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek!

the Kazakh Government misses the point of the Borat film, insofar as most of the jokes are not targeted at Kazakhs at all. Kazakhstan is simply a convenient stick with which to poke fun at a culture that is so ignorant of the rest of the world that it swallows the idea that there exists a whole country populated by boorish fools who have only incompletely made it to modernity.

Keep those guesses coming! (As long as it keeps you thinking.)

Professor Emrys Westacott is my kinda guy. He says that rudeness gets a bum rap.

Ever called a friend “Meathead”? That, he said, might strike some as a bit rude. But calling someone a meathead could be a “way that we establish, affirm and strengthen bonds of friendship and intimacy,” Professor Westacott writes. … In addition, he writes, “teasing is one important way in which asymmetries and pecking orders are established, sustained and challenged.” …

That’s why God invented snark. And David Letterman:

Welcome to the show. You folks are here on a great night. What a tremendous night to be here. Apologizing tonight — Jason Alexander and the fat guy who played Newman.

But it is a beautiful day here in New York City, isn’t it? So beautiful today that Michael Richards was apologizing in the park.

He has won over uniikely people with his showbiz-style rallies and colorful banners and fiery charisma. That’s one possible reason for the incongruous image of a hot chick wearing (barely) a Hezbollah flag (Hezbollah is a sharia-loving Islamist party, something that doesn’t seem to have occurred to this young woman: that her future under Hezbollah will preclude showing off her dreads blond-streaked tresses and her skin).

The Big Pharaoh explains things a bit differently:

The political arena of Lebanon is known for the often bizzare alliances between the various political factions. One of the strangest alliances we’re witnessing these days is between Hezbollah and the Free Patriotic Movement, the powerful Christian political party led by General Michel Aoun,

In Lebanon people regard Allah to be above in the sky and their political (sect) leader on earth. If their sect leader said the sun will rise from the west, then you should expect his followers to agree. This is what happened in the case of the Aoun-Hezbollah alliance. Aoun, who was against Hezbollah when he was in Paris, is now saying Nasrallah is cute and cuddly. His Christian followers immediately answered with an amen.

The above led to the below picture. A Christian chick and follower of Aoun draped in the Hezbollah flag. That’s the definition of irony right: a low waist wearing Lebanese chick with a tattoo above her buttocks draped in a Hezbollah flag.

This is Lebanese politics people.

Oh.

Are we having fun yet?

I am not a particular fan of Ehud Olmert. He is certainly no charismatic leader. But he is smart, and I believe he sees clearly exactly where his country fits into the current geopolitical stew.

It is absolutely clear that Israel will have to make some visible concessions in the very near future. The first of these is for Israel to “show restraint”—even when it’s unfair.

Yes. That’s how it is when you are the stronger party. And that’s how he’s playing it.

Olmert “gave the security forces instructions to show restraint and to try and give the cease-fire the possibility to succeed,” said Miri Eisin, Olmert’s spokeswoman.

“Israel is a strong country which can allow itself to have the strength to both fight and also to show restraint and to give the cease-fire a chance to be implemented,” Eisin quoted Olmert as saying.

Not that there aren’t gains to be realized from this stance, because there are—such as recapturing some moral high ground.

So we as a society need to “de-stigmatize” the obese. So, naturally, there should be entire university departments devoted to the study of those who have a lot of adipose tissue.

Right? Maybe, maybe not, says the New York Times:

“Why should I be ashamed?” said Ms. Director, 22, a graduate student in women’s studies at San Diego State University, who wields the word with both defiance and pride, the way the gay community uses queer. “I’m fat. So what?”

During her sophomore year at Smith College, Ms. Director attended a discussion on fat discrimination: the way the super-sized are marginalized, the way excessive girth is seen as a moral failing rather than the result of complicated factors. But the academic community, she felt, didn’t really give the topic proper consideration. She decided to do something about it.

In December 2004, she helped found the organization Size Matters, whose goal was to promote size acceptance and positive body image. In April, the group sponsored a conference called Fat and the Academy, a three-day event at Smith of panel discussions and performances by academics, researchers, activists and artists. Nearly 150 people attended.

Even as science, medicine and government have defined obesity as a threat to the nation’s health and treasury, fat studies is emerging as a new interdisciplinary area of study on campuses across the country and is gaining interest in Australia and Britain. Nestled within the humanities and social sciences fields, fat studies explores the social and political consequences of being fat.

When the larger issue—i.e., which subjects warrant in-depth academic research and study?—is addressed, however, we get an alternative view from Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars:

“Ethnic studies, women’s studies, queer studies — they’re all about vindicating the grievances of some particular group. That’s not what the academy should be about.

“Obviously in the classroom you can look at issues of right and wrong and justice and injustice,” he added, “But if the purpose is to vindicate fatness, to make fatness seem better in the eyes of society, then that purpose begs a fundamental intellectual question.”

And that question is

[w]hether activism is an appropriate goal for academia.

Which is

a controversial notion.

And I’m going to all this trouble to quote the New York Times phrase by phrase because this issue of activism by academics and in academia is sure to raise its head again.

Caracas, Venezuela  November 25, 2006

Supporters of Venezuela’s opposition leader Manuel Rosales wave the national flag during a campaign rally in Caracas, Venezuela, Saturday, Nov. 25, 2006. (AP)

(via Gateway Pundit)

Why does no one ever criticize Jesse Jackson for the stupid, stupid things he says?

For good reason, he’s upset about Michael Richards’s hideous name-calling rant (I won’t call it “racist”: to me, racism is something that goes beyond mere name-calling, and I think that if we, as a society, decide that mere name-calling is racism, then we are doing a terrible disservice to people who suffer from real racism—the kind that doesn’t just hurt their feelings; the kind that persecutes people by denying them the same rights that other people have.).

Anyway, here’s Jesse Jackson sticking up for blacks by trashing not only Michael Richards but also the Seinfeld show. Because it featured only whites [emphasis mine]

Though Richards made an apologetic call to the civil rights leader last week, Jackson said he wants to use the comic’s outburst as an opportunity to start a national discussion about “racial insensitivity and indifference” in American society.

“We want to raise the larger question of racial insensitivity … and have a dialogue,” Jackson said. …

Jackson said Hollywood has a history of racial inequality and singled out “Seinfeld” for not reflecting reality. He noted that other than the occasional appearance of a black lawyer, the show was “lily white.”

Really, now. Is it somehow helpful, when talking about racial insensitivity, to paint everyone associated with a “guilty party”—in this case the Seinfeld show—with the same broad brush?