Alec Mouhibian

I bemoan Stephen King at American Spectator Online today. The piece is directed at his literary sermons, not his novels, so you might be interested even if you haven’t read them.

It begins thusly:

Just when I faced the possibility of being starved of spooks this Halloween season, along came Stephen King.

King, of course, is well-practiced at supplying spooks. I’m not talking about his novels. Those aren’t nearly as scary as his occasional forays into literary sermonizing, which should appall anyone who cares about the state of American sensibility.

Read the rest here.

The Armenian Genocide shouldn’t be cheapened by Congressional votes, but it must be recognized by the President and fully integrated with United States foreign policy. For more on the continuing relevance of the Genocide, see my oped in today’s Los Angeles Times.  

Take a dazzling screenplay, give it to Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter to refresh, Academy Award-winner Kenneth Branagh to redirect, and the redoubtable Michael Caine and Jude Law to act out, and even offer the original Sleuth—a brilliant 1972 film starring Lawrence Olivier and Caine—as a benchmark and inspiration, and what happens? Well, to begin with, Harold Pinter rewrites the script without watching the original film. And thence unfurls a pageant of pomp and postmodernism that makes the second Sleuth self-destracing, forgettable, and—to adopt the language of its rewriter—shallow as piss.

I administer the divorce of liberalism and libertarianism at The American Spectator Online. Read the article here.

I never thought the day would come. But here it is! Being an Armenian — like playing women’s basketball at Rutgers, losing money on Enron, and contracting AIDS in Africa before it — is now relevant and topical. Hell, yes. I feel so damn temporarily important, and I wouldn’t trade it for having sold steroids to sluggers or resisted arrest in Los Angeles or, for that matter, having rented storefront from Barney Frank. Bask, fellow Armenians! Bask. Ours is the world and all that’s in it — and, which is more, we’ll have a hairy son.

Lest you’ve been comatose or going to history class at Princeton, the source of the spotlight is Congress’s resolution to recognize the Armenian genocide of 1915 as “genocide.” Turkey still insists it was merely a transportation malfunction, in which 1.5 million Armenians mysteriously vanished as piles of human carcasses appeared in their place.

Observers may find the issue inherently dull at first sight. Be patient. You don’t want to miss the massive collateral amusement — whether it’s Islamic Turkey taking postmodern relativism to its logical conclusion, competitors in the victim business afraid of losing market-share, arch unilateralists waxing worrisome over the self-esteem of a pathetically dependent ally, or truth-trumpeting moralists suddenly blowing dry in the name of diplomacy. Progressives have a meta-political reason to like the Armenian issue: it always results in an equal distribution of hypocrisy.

Add a few drops of Bush blood and you get a media frenzy that far outdoes anything surrounding the issue in its cyclical past. Jon Stewart gave it two segments on the Daily Show. The blogosphere is very enjoyably in thrall. And for the most trenchant criticism of the resolution, see Garin’s piece in the Washington Times.

Even if Congress ends up restraining the resolution, this should be considered a victory for the tireless Armenian advocacy brigade. Awareness — of the international insult-to-injury of denial — is all they can really expect. “Who today,” Hitler asked his elite generals nine days before invading Poland, “speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Our next tyrant will have to find some other fodder for his pep-talk.

Any achievement beyond this level of exposure would be purely symbolic. No moderately reasonable person can fail to identify the historical event as genocide. Unless, of course, he’s playing dumb — either because he’s grown used to it as a writer for the Nation, or because he’s on the Turkish dole.

Did you know the Armenian issue has actually been a hot topic in the Anglo-American world once before? Herbert Hoover, reflecting on 1919, said “the name Armenia was in the front of the American mind… known to the American schoolchild only a little less than England.” Ravaged survivors became a cause celebre of roarin’ do-gooders. Pride bonus: no government funding was involved. Calvin Coolidge spoke fondly of the “private enterprise” from 1919 to 1929 that raised today’s equivalent of over $1 billion in charity for Armenians.

Virginia Woolf even used the Armenian issue as a device in the character development of Mrs. Dalloway.

“Armenians,” he said; or perhaps it was “Albanians….

He was already halfway to the House of Commons, to his Armenians, his Albanians, having settled her on the sofa, looking at his roses. And people would say, “Clarissa Dalloway is spoilt.” She cared much more for her roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over again) — no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?) — the only flowers she could bear to see cut.

Mrs. Dalloway’s cavalier confusion of the two A-ians reveals her socialite shallowness. Perhaps today’s issue can be used by a working novelist (Kristin Gore?) to develop one of her characters. Then it can be referred to in 2097, when being Armenian is cool again, thanks to some historically-conscious teamsters who lobby Congress to finally recognize the cinematic contributions of Rueben Mamoulian.

(This piece appeared in the American Spectator Online)

Speaking of the current inclination to treat American troops as victims, Robert Kaplan had an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal last week about that very phenomenon.

Rather than hated, like during Vietnam, now the troops are “loved.”

That line says it all, but you should read the whole thing. Kaplan is America’s finest military correspondent (he writes for The Atlantic Monthly) and is qualified to report on the temper of our troops.

Lt. Mark Daily, commissioned to Iraq as an officer upon graduating with honors from UCLA in 2005, was slain there earlier this year. Before deployment he left behind an eloquent statement on why he joined the Army ROTC despite his prior reservations about the war. According to his family, he’d found a kindred perspective in the writings of Christopher Hitchens.

Recently Hitchens found this out. After the thaw, he went to meet Daily’s family. He describes the experience, and what he learned about Daily himself, in the new issue of Vanity Fair. You don’t want to miss it.

UPDATE: I didn’t sufficiently emphasize the significance of Daily’s “Why I Joined” statement, for the sake of those who haven’t read it. Daily graduated UCLA just before I transferred there, so I never met him. With permission from his brother, Eric Daily, we reprinted “Why I Joined” (initially only available on Myspace) in the April issue of the Bruin Standard. Formatting Daily’s text into the issue, I felt something very similar to what Hitchens describes early in the VF article, without the personal basis for being jarred that obviously applied to Hitchens.

This was, I realize now, entirely because of the vision and personality imparted by Daily’s statement. While Hitchens does a fine job of making his own piece more about Daily than about Hitchens, you need to read Daily’s piece to really learn something. Both pieces, together with the recent disgrace of the The New Republic having published phony dispatches from a semi-literate faux-soldier, show that the fog of war these days is more blinding to those who don’t serve in it.

CORRECTION: Originally I had misstated some details, which I’ve fixed above but want to further clarify here.

1) Daily did not join specifically to go to Iraq. He joined, in his family’s words, “to serve his country and make a difference somewhere in the world, though he knew there was a strong chance he could deploy to Iraq. Ultimately that’s where his job and his duty sent him.”

2) “His commitment to serve his country, and to help the oppressed was solidified well before reading Hitchens’ pieces. He was just gratified to find a writer of Hitchens’ stature and background who felt and wrote so eloquently what he himself felt.”

This is important, considering the popular inclination to portray soldiers as victims of foolish idealism. Any such inclinations toward Daily can be firmly corrected by reading his statement.

In the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen.

Genesis 8:5

If skies are clear in Yerevan today, it’s absolute proof of the existence of God.