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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." -Aldous Huxley
You've stumbled upon the website of Jeremy Lott. (To learn more about me, go here.) I can be reached at JEREMYAL123 -- AT -- YAHOO.COM.
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wSunday, November 30, 2003 |
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LAST ONE BEFORE I HEAD HOME: From the August issue of the Spectator:
Son of Saul
by Jeremy Lott
In the modern American vocabulary, "nepotism" has become a mildly dirty term, like "white trash" or "White House intern." The last presidential race, a contest between the sons of two political dynasties, prompted talking heads to worry that the country was regressing. Brit transplant Andrew Sullivan noted the countries other than the United States -- North Korea, Jordan, Syria -- that had recently passed power from father to son (never mind the Clinton interlude). In a spasm of the kind of selfless consideration that is characteristic of much of his writing, Sullivan asked, "I emigrated for this?" In a similar vein -- so to speak -- former National Review editor John O'Sullivan, contemplating a second Bush administration, put an old taunt by Walter Savage Landor to new use:
George the First was always reckoned Vile,
but viler George the Second;
And what mortal ever heard
Any good of George the Third?
When from earth the Fourth descended
(God be praised!) the Georges ended
However, the scandal of nepotism may be less, well, scandalous than the handwringers are making out. Though a series of man-on-the-street interviews will undoubtedly draw blanket condemnation of the practice (along, I learned, with plenty of blank stares, followed by "What does that mean?"), Americans are highly tolerant of nepotism in public and private life. Voters are more likely to support a candidate if they cast ballots for his father, and businesses have long preferred to hire family members of good employees on the assumption that they come from good stock or that they will keep their relatives in line. As one wag put it, "Like all good Americans, I am absolutely opposed to nepotism in any form, unless I benefit from it."
Getting an accurate measure on what people think about nepotism is made more difficult, says Adam Bellow in the introduction to In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History, by the narrow, popular use of the term. They see nepotism at work only when someone hires a grossly incompetent relative over a more promising applicant. Pulling strings to get a relative a job, however, is not seen, ipso facto, as an act of nepotism, which "leaves us in the logically inconsistent position of saying that hiring a relative is not nepotism depending on the relative's performance."
The problem, as Bellow argues it, is a flaw in the language. We need to be able to distinguish between bad, or old, nepotism and good (i.e. "new") nepotism. The former was divisive and coercive. That new nepotism is an altogether slipperier fish: more voluntary and meritocratic, less blatant, unlikely to exclude whole classes of people.
But the book is not simply a polemic, and in fact it claims somewhat tongue in cheek to be a measured treatment of the subject. When Bellow set out to write a book on nepotism, he envisioned something along the lines of William Henry's wonderful, brief In Defense of Elitism, but the project shifted as he learned that virtually nothing had been written on nepotism. The research took much longer than anticipated and he ended up writing the book that he would have relied upon if he had written a shorter essay on the subject. The "natural history" of the subtitle thus determines the organization and style of the book-divided into two sections of almost equal length: "Nepotism in History" followed by "Nepotism in America."
Many readers will find the beginning of the first half rough going. It starts with a chapter on sociobiology which, depending on your point of view, is either a source of the latest cutting-edge insights or daffy theorizing passed off as legitimate science. Bellow rarely comes back to the subject in subsequent chapters but when he does, the results are not pleasant. Discussing the 22nd chapter of Genesis, Bellow explains that "Abraham's surprising readiness to sacrifice Isaac . . . suggest[s] that he is . . . a bad father but a first-rate patriarch, willing to trade off living sons against the promise of uncounted future offspring. Like a hymenopteran [ant] queen who may sacrifice some offspring to preserve the hive, Abraham has the long-term nepotistic vision that God requires." (It's not a man, not an ant, it's a . . . mant!)
This approach creates its own problems beyond easy mockery. The biological drive for nepotism -- that we advance our family's interests because that's how nature programmed us to help spread our genes -- runs into the historical tendency of people to expand the bounds of "family," whether through adoption, exchanges of small amounts of blood, or various religious rituals. The fact that these practices date back to the beginning of recorded history puts a mighty crimp in the idea that the desire to sacrifice for one's family is controlled by biology -- or controlled only by biology at any rate.
So, yes, this is a flawed work -- in some aspects deeply flawed -- but Bellow's dogged insistence on looking at history through the lens of family striving as an engine for both change and stability is quite useful. Thus we can see how African tribes were able to establish relative peace through intermarriage and polygamy (hint: it's harder to kill the in-laws, no matter how great the temptation); how the Rothschilds were able to first build up a vast fortune and use that bounty to help keep the peace in Europe for the latter half of the 19th century (revolution was bad for business and European rulers needed money); and how the American Revolution helped to turn nepotism, almost overnight, into something to be embarrassed about. (The king was seen by many as a father figure who doled out privileges to his more dutiful "sons.")
It's also an audacious work. The author's own literary upbringing, the title, and the cover -- a single silver spoon -- all scream a message that Bellow is reluctant to the point of denial to declare: the stigma that was once attached to nepotism is fading away and that's a good thing. He argues that it could be a good counterbalance to the arrogance that supposedly comes along with American meritocracy, because people chosen for their own skills don't owe a debt to anyone.
I could object to this on a number of grounds (e.g., kinship is far from the only basis for gratitude), but Bellow has a ready-made reply, firmly grounded in history and human nature: most opponents of nepotism are at least somewhat self-interested. In fact, once the corrupt unworthies have been purged, strict meritocrats often prove remarkably adept at practicing nepotism themselves.
posted by
Jeremy at 10:26 PM
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wSaturday, November 29, 2003 |
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BOOK REVIEW WEEKEND II: At least one more yet to come. Again, from Books in Canada:
Cold Shoulder
by Jeremy Lott
THE EPIGRAPH to this book serves fair notice that what follows will be not be easy sledding. G.M. Ford (yes, that is his real name) quotes British novelist G.K. Chesterton saying that while ''children are innocent and love justice,'' most of us are ''wicked and prefer mercy.''
Hear, hear: A Blind Eye opens with true crime writer Frank Corso running from Texas rangers with an ominous subpoena. They want to drag him in to question before a grand jury in connection with a book-selling boast that
he knew where a body was buried. The truth is, Corso only knew a guy who knew where the body was buried, and the gentleman who knew has pulled a runner.
To avoid a long jail sentence and possible financial ruin, Corso must avoid Texas' finest until the grand jury expires in a little over a week. He has tricked his photographer and former lover, the six-foot-tall tattooed goth Amazon, Meg Dougherty, into coming along for the high speed chase. The pursuit takes them to the outskirts of an isolated Illinois town in the middle of the mother of all blizzards. Their rented SUV crashes and the two narrowly escape death by struggling into an old abandoned cabin.
In the process of cannibalizing the floor of a nearby shack for firewood, they discover the bodies of the previous inhabitants, sealed in plastic bags. Because of re-election problems, the local sheriff promises to give the Texas Rangers the slip if, and only if, Corso agrees to get to the bottom of this.
It's an offer they can't refuse, but they soon find that the devil cuts less exacting deals. The search for the family's killer takes Corso and Dougherty to a soon-to-be-abandoned convent, where they learn of a mad sex-crazed girl with a cloudy past and an equally murky, violent future. They continue to follow her bloody footprints through the shadier parts of
the Northeast. The more they learn, the worse the picture looks, including backwoods incest, mass murder, and the complete indifference of law enforcement to all of the above.
As the third novel in a mystery series, A Blind Eye is a bit of a let down. It's not just that the book feels like it was rushed or that the set up is too neat (e.g., Corso is on the run because he can't find a dead body, and -- lo! -- he stumbles onto a bunch of dead bodies). In order for bleak books to work, there has to be somebody for the reader to pull for. But neither Corso, nor the often bitchy Dougherty, nor any of the other characters they bump into for that matter, fit that bill, leaving us with a lot of gratuitous violence (which, I admit, can be fun) with little context for understanding it.
The book does have its moments. I particularly liked the gag, at Seattleites Corso and Dogherty's expense, about not being able to get a double tall latte at a back country diner; and the pacing and writing are at least a couple of notches above most mystery novels. In fact, one tack that Ford tries is to explore the mystery of Corso himself.
Unlike Ford's previous series of first person Leo Watterman mysteries, this group of novels is told at a remove. The details of Corso's past life trickle out only grudgingly, from one volume to the next. It's a cheap trick but it works: This installment left me curious enough to come back for the next book in the series.
posted by
Jeremy at 11:36 PM
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BOOK REVIEW WEEKEND: I've been vacationing in the other Washington this week. Here's a book review, from the September issue of Books in Canada. I'll post a few more in the next few days, in lieu of new material:
Or, Let's Not
by Jeremy Lott
THE PAGES OF Ray Bradbury's new book crackle with lightning (!); pathos (!); bathos (!); bad puns (!); and dozens (!)--nay, hundreds (!) -- of obscure '60s pop culture references! It underscores all of this with lots (!) and lots (!) of mild obscenity (!) and obsessive punctuation!! Really!!!!
If that intro annoys the reader as much as it does the reviewer (In college, I objected to one textbook on the grounds that it had too many exclamation marks.) then you might want to give Let's All Kill Constance a pass. Unlike Bradbury's recent decent collection of short stories, One More For the Road, this novel has all the signs of Literary Greatness Syndrome -- that is, the author's name has become enough of a draw that he no longer has to turn out decent prose to pay the bills, and he knows it.
To be fair to Bradbury, he serves readers notice that this is not likely to be one his better efforts. Underneath a stunning cover painting by Jose Luis Merino -- best described as Narcissus meets the roaring '20s -- the story begins ''It was a dark and stormy night. Is that one way to catch your reader? Well then, it was a dark and stormy night...''
The writer-hero of the story is banging away at his typewriter in his beach house in Venice, California, in the wee hours of the morning, trying to finish a new schlock horror novel (''digging graves'' to cure insomnia). All the sudden, someone knocks on the door. When the author opens it, a woman's frame is illuminated by a ''series of flicker-flash lightning bolts.''
The silhouette belongs to ex-movie star Constance Rattigan, known to friends and foes alike as ''the Rattigan.'' This normally abrasive personality is shaken by the discovery that someone has sent her a ''book of the dead" -- a phonebook from 1900 with some names marked with red ''crucifixes'' (in reality, just crosses). Constance worries that
something in her past is finally catching up with her, and she disappears shortly thereafter.
The un-named narrator-hero (a writer with thick black glasses who at one point has this great idea about a hero who burns books with kerosene...) joins with friends and sidekicks -- including grumpy police detective Elmo Crumley, the clear-seeing Blind Henry, and legendary movie director Fritz Wong -- to attempt to find Constance. Instead they uncover a trail of dead bodies, all connected to the Rattigan in some way -- a priest, a projectionist, a psychic, her ex-husband--and a series of one-off actresses of yesteryear who went missing after they made it big. The gumshoes begin to believe that if Constance is alive, she should be stopped before she can do any more damage. If it wasn't so cumbersome, Bradbury might have added ''before she kills again'' to the title.
And yet, we're given little reason, if any, to care about the outcome. Dedicated fans may find things to like in this book to make up for the bad staccato dialogue, thin chapters, poor characterization, and ludicrous plot (such as the kerosene joke above), but I suspect to most readers, it will come off more as a bad B-movie script than an enjoyable mystery novel. I guess you could say we'll have to all kill Constance some other time.
posted by
Jeremy at 4:18 PM
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wSunday, November 23, 2003 |
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NOT AN APOLOGY, BUT...: Matthew Barganier plants that wet one. Er, more like sticks out his tongue, really. He says the entire American Spectator doesn't like him when, in reality, only I don't like him.
Actually, even that would be a bit of a stretch. I simply dislike that he accused us of purging a writer, issued only a snarky retraction, and then said TAS online was like National Review Online because we publish some warmongers. We also publish peacemongers, pro civil liberties stuff, and even interesting writing about Islam in the West. The thing that irks me the most about his criticisms is that they are clearly the product of a mind that isn't familiar with what it's slamming.
posted by
Jeremy at 11:24 PM
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wFriday, November 21, 2003 |
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NO BLOG HIATUS FOR THIS BOY: Just the usual slow trickle. Deadline week, you know. However, I would like to draw readers' attention to today's online edition of The American Spectator. I think it is the single best day we've had thus far: Great art on the front page which links to a pitch perfect piece by super intern Shawn Macomber on Judge Roy Moore; boss and friend Wlady Pleszczynski proves once again that he's a far better stylist than this blogger, with a reflection on the death of JFK; Jim Bovard gives us the first part of his book tour (and Matthew Barganier can plant a wet one on my ample backside); Lawrence Henry... oh, just go read. And poke around while you're there. I have become increasingly proud of the site. The style, the wit, the reporting, the eclecticism: There's nothing else quite like it on the net today.
posted by
Jeremy at 9:36 AM
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wTuesday, November 18, 2003 |
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HOW TO EXPENSE THOSE DRINKS: Went to the first Ban the Ban Pub Crawl last Friday and wrote something about it. I was annoyed that nobody else has linked to it yet, but then I noticed that I was included in the list. So here:
WASHINGTON -- It was 7:49 Friday night at Millie & Al's, a pub on 18th Street in the Adams Morgan district, and it looked like any other night. A hockey game flickered on the small television screen; elk antlers hung near the back wall next to a string of M&M Christmas lights; behind the bar, the light that signaled $1 jello shooters was not yet activated; working stiffs, tired from the week, unwound at the bar while friends laughed and chatted at tables. I had a bottle of Guinness in front of me and a pizza on the way, but I kept glancing toward the entrance, and back at the patrons.
Right about 7:50, the door swung open and at least a dozen twentysomethings shuffled through. The thing that caught the customers' eyes was not so much the size of this crowd, but that they were all wearing the same white T-shirt with [BAN] THE [BAN] bracketed and in bold. The camera crew from Channel 7 that followed them, with a spotlight illuminating the room, also managed to turn a few heads. "Bet you didn't know you were going to be on TV tonight," said my waiter.
True, but I had an inkling. Ban the Ban is that old cliché, a genuine grassroots effort, with all of the weirdness that entails. These inactivists aim to convince the D.C. City Council to refrain from passing the Smokefree Workplaces Act of 2003, which will prohibit, among other things, smoking in restaurants and bars -- thus the group's unusual venue for a protest. Millie & Al's was only the first stop of the night in the first Ban the Ban Pub Crawl, and nobody -- protesters and observers alike -- was sure quite what to make of it. [more]
posted by
Jeremy at 7:51 PM
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wThursday, November 13, 2003 |
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LAAAAAST NIGHT: Yesterday, a little before four in the afternoon, I called a friend and asked where I could get some caffeine pills. My normal delivery systems (Coke, coffee, etc.) just weren't cutting it. Two mornings in a row of staying up past three had made for one of the most unproductive days in a very long time, and I had to attend the Spectator dinner last night. He couldn't help me with the pills but he said to go get some pink Sobe, and at the Rite Aid counter I found coffe mints with "Extreme Caffeine." Four mints, the writing on the aluminum can explain, equal one cup of coffee. Needless to say, I had a lot more than four.
And boy the Spectator dinner was fun. All the Spectator people (Spectatorites? Spectators? TASers? -- still haven't come up with anything as good as Reportsters) were supposed to be spread out, but I ended up at the same table with office manager Suzanne Shaffer, super intern Shawn Macomber, the adorable Theodora Blanchfield, and international woman of mystery Katherine Ruddy (Wlady P., Bob Tyrrell, Al Regnery, and George Neumayr were, however, distributed into the audience) . Which was fortunate because I probably had a bit too much to drink during the reception. It was good to have friends to reign me in and roll their eyes at my antics rather than take offense.
Highlights: Met John Tabin and Cynthia Grenier. Took money for Zell Miller's new book as he signed it after an actually enjoyable speech. Danced (well, sort of danced -- more like tried not to step on too many feet) with Suzanne, Katherine, and Theodora while Bob and his wife put this Baptist boy to shame. I left, as they say, with a spring in my step and a song in my heart. And I woke up this morning to discover that my streak of not getting an hangover is unbroken.
posted by
Jeremy at 10:15 AM
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wTuesday, November 11, 2003 |
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FINAL REPORT: Well, turns out Kevin Michael Grace hasn't just been lying low; he has (with Kevin Steel) been compiling a dossier on our former employer. The title of his most recent post is "I Accuse Link Byfield." It's worth a read. Steel's extensive archive of documents is also fairly damning.
posted by
Jeremy at 11:32 PM
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wSaturday, November 08, 2003 |
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ACK! E-MAIL REMINDER: As my new column makes clear, y'all won't be able to reach me at my old deviantreadings address. Send pitches, letters, and marriage proposals to JEREMYAL123 -- AT -- YAHOO -- . -- COM (dashes and spaces inserted to foil evil spambots):
"Warning: Your mailbox is full!" was not the message in my in-box I expected to see this Sunday morning when I returned home from a night of partying, movie going, and sleeping on a friend's couch. In fact, it was the last thing I expected. And it was more -- much more -- than a trifling annoyance.
It meant that half a dozen essays that were supposed to come in had bounced back to the writers, with a note telling them (erroneously) that my e-mailbox was all full up; try back later, once I had done my part and taken out the trash. It meant that I had to reactivate an old back-up e-mail account and try to alert people to use that one instead. It meant coming in to the office on Sunday night and calling people all over North America to put the Monday edition of the website together. And it meant another little piece of my past had been lost. [more]
posted by
Jeremy at 12:55 PM
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GENDER SMACKDOWN FRIDAYS: Yesterday, the Spectator ran an article by one Marty Nemko (KMG made up name alert!) arguing that married women, specifically those with children, don't work enough, because they expect their husbands ("beasts of burden") to manage way more weight than they should reasonably be expected to shoulder. The image on the front page (by one Kevin Steel) is a sketch of a woman gazing imperiously at Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill, with the title "Workin' for the Ma'am." Last Friday, we ran a piece by Kelly Torrance on the extremes some American women will go to to get married. I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Maybe we'll run a review of Laura Kipnis' Against Love: A Polemic for next weekend.
posted by
Jeremy at 12:48 PM
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wWednesday, November 05, 2003 |
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SHAMELESS (BUT WORTHWHILE) PLUGS: I've been so busy these last few weeks working on the new site that I've had little chance to promote it. That's a shame because we've published some great pieces that deserve a wider audience. To wit:
International woman of mystery Katherine Ruddy on the media circus last Thursday, when the capital was locked down over a kids' toy.
Andrew Simmons attends a bluegrass festival and, uh, has a bone to pick with the audience.
Kathy Shaidle dials for fatwas.
Daniel McCarthy on the Tories' likely tough-as-nails new leader.
Bill Croke on the burial of Buffalo Bill (a last minute convert, I learned).
Kelly Torrance on new extreme routes to wedlock.
And some idiot on a story that was practically a Spectator exclusive, a man jumping in front of the Metro at the East Falls Church station.
We really are publishing stuff that you won't find anywhere else, and the new look is not hard on the eyes. I'd ask readers to bookmark the front page and make it a daily stop. And if you read something there that you like or hate, we sure wouldn't mind the linkage.
posted by
Jeremy at 8:53 AM
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wMonday, November 03, 2003 |
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ACK! MY E-MAIL HAS GONE TO HELL: If you people need to reach me for the next few days, try JEREMYAL123-AT-YAHOO.com.
posted by
Jeremy at 10:43 AM
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