lightreads

In 2004, Theo van Gogh (great great something or other of Vincent), filmmaker and professional polemicist was murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist. This book is partly about him – about what led to his death and what came after – but it’s mostly about the Netherlands as a microcosm of the intellectual and political friction of European ideals and Islamic fundamentalism. The book profiles notable Muslim critics – the racists, the atheists, the culturalists, the feminists. Van Gogh rates the title, but for my money this is mostly a book about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the broader intellectual context for the tensions arising as Muslim immigrants continue arriving in Europe.

A brilliant book, and nothing short of riveting. It made me angry; it made my head ache; it exhausted me; it frustrated me. There’s so much perspicacity packed into this slim volume. Buruma spends most of it recounting significant social movements with pithy accuracy, and the rest casting an unflinching eye over scholars, politicians, critics, activists, fundamentalists, and bystanders. He talks about immigration, he talks about religion, he talks about violence, he talks about activism, he talks about culture and multiculturalism and the pushback and racism. He is deliberate and lightly mocking throughout, and absolutely no one is spared.

He does have a tendency to treat minority groups as one uniform body, but even this is done with deliberate irony. It’s only appropriate, after all, when characterizing how Turkish and Moroccan immigrants are differently perceived. No, my real problem with this book was Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh was, well. How do I put this delicately? I hated him. He firmly believed that it’s impossible for the children of the Enlightenment to live in peace with Islamic fundamentalists, but more importantly the way he expressed that opinion was nothing short of loathsome. Buruma does his best in showing that Van Gogh was a more general dissident than a specifically offensive one, and to place him in the context of the rhetoric of abusive criticism (it’s an honest-to-God thing, really), but for once he seems to have missed the essential point. Van Gogh once said of a Jewish critic who had come to the defense of a friend he’d attacked that she, “has wet dreams of being fucked by Dr. Mengele.” That’s one of the more mild comments. Buruma comes right out and says that Van Gogh was not a racist, but I’m sorry, propounding hate speech makes you complicit in hate. Full stop.

Anyway. I’m getting sidetracked. That’s one wobble of perception in a book otherwise painfully clear-sighted, fearlessly willing to face complication head-on. It didn’t quite address the question of criticism in the way I was anticipating – someone, somewhere has written an intelligent, insightful piece on the seemingly inextricable knot of racism and anti-multiculturalism/cultural criticism, and the problem of how cultural insiders and outsiders can collaborate in criticism. This is not that book, but that’s okay because the book it is will be lingering with me for a long, long time.

Highly recommended.

This book, which does exactly what the title says, managed to alienate, outrage, and offend me while expressing opinions about our electoral system and current president that I entirely agree with. It started out with a bang, with this little gem in the introduction:

The Republican sweep of the House of Representatives in 1994 marked one high-water mark of this new radicalism as Newt Gingrich notoriously described President Clinton as “the enemy of normal Americans” and the neoconservative stalwart Kenneth Starr went sniffing through the dirty laundry of a White House intern who didn’t know when to keep her mouth shut.

And aside from being a terribly written sentence, excuse me? Of all the – I don’t even – sexist fuckwit! Yeah, that was clearly all her fault. God!

So yeah, my teeth were sharpened for the rest of this book, which details the scope of election fraud in this country, from the Boss Tweed machine to the organized and often violent voter disenfranchisement in the south to Chicago to 2000. And it’s a good history, as history goes, rather lacking in personality but stunning in scope even to those of us who already know these things. However.

However. You do not get to call your book “nonpartisan,” as Gumbel does in his introduction, and then turn around and deliver frothing screed after screed against the Republicans and Bush. It just makes you look like more of a jackass than you already do. Granted, the history did include both Republican and Democratic fraud, but that’s not being nonpartisan, that’s reporting, and he should really know the difference, considering his job.

But here’s the real problem. This is a book about how the American electoral system is broken, about the hundreds of thousands of mostly low-income and minority people who do not get to meaningfully participate in government for very deliberate and specific systemic reasons. And the book is written to a college educated audience of liberals (I guarantee even many moderates would put it down after the introduction), presupposing a very deep and specific knowledge of political history (I looked a few things up, and I have a fucking degree in this stuff). And in the small handwave to reform he gives in the conclusion, he’s all about how change has to come from the bottom. Uh, yeah, and by “the grassroots” you mean college-educated, left of left liberal men? You know, it’s really a particular kind of disgusting when an author sneers at the elitist machine, and then turns around and pulls crap like this.

Lastly, and I really am almost done here, Gumbel just isn’t very good at, you know, making an argument. He spends three hundred pages knocking down the widespread American assumption that our elections are fair and honest (they aren’t and never have been), and simultaneously keeps pounding at the fact that the popular right to elect the President is not actually a constitutional right. (No, it’s really not – the first mention of it is in the fifteenth amendment, and strict constructionists still can and do argue that the right does not rest at all with the people.) And a better writer could have pulled this off into the presumptive argument that we do all in fact deserve votes, and things need to change. Gumbel, however, makes a few vague hand wavy motions on the subject, assumes again and correctly that everyone reading will be a political science professor or a journalist or someone else who has already reached that conclusion, and forgets the whole thing.

Graaah.