Jujitsui Generis

No Country For Old Men

For those interested in the novels of Cormac McCarthy, here's a review of his latest novel, 'No Country For Old Men'.  I've just started, but will comment later on this scathing review by David Hellman. 

Dead Souls are Dangerous

A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.  ~ George William Curtis

While there are still Americans who make the connection between love of country and the principles that let freedom ring, their numbers are dwindling.  The US has become increasingly dichotomized—on one end, a cluster of jingoists; on the other, a cluster of the intellectual anointed.  For the former group, patriotism has something to do with Lee Greenwood, the Bible and NASCAR.  For the latter, patriotism is passé.  And while there are many for whom a pro-America argument is “God Bless America” played on a continuous loop, the most dangerous group is the herd of intellectuals headed toward what Samuel P. Huntington calls “denationalization.” ...

When Heroes Fall (Maybe)

Phillip Roth is a literary hero of mine. Isn't he for a lot of people? This is the man who penned the feminist-academic character Delphine LeRoux with such incisiveness in The Human Stain:

She is utterly alone, unsupported, homeless, decountried--depaysee. In a free state but oftentimes so forlornly depaysee. Ambitious? She happens to be more ambitious than all those staunch go-it-alone feminists put together, but because men are drawn to her... she wears a vintage Chanel jacket with tight jeans, or a slip dress in summer, and because she likes cashmere and leather, the women are resentful.

Roth has it all. And now it appears he's sunk to the lowest common demoninator in his fiction... Political commentary. More specifically, he may have joined the ranks of the pseudointelligencia in picking on the President. Granted, I haven't read The Plot Against America. And it is allegory. But I've seen enough of the tickled-pink reviews by the Bush-bashing literati. Though Roth denies parallels between his story of fear-mongering by anti-Semitic president Charles Lindbergh and the current Administration, when he said that Bush "wasn't fit to run a general store," somehow I didn't believe him.

The book very well may be good. I love Phillip Roth. But it's been easy to get caught up in taking pot shots at Bush to prove you're an intellectual. (They did the same to Truman.) America's best writer doesn't need to do that. So let's hope for the sake of our hero-worship that Roth's alternate America stands on its own, and that he hasn't gone all shallow and Swiftian on us.