The best account of Hollywood's anti-American films

... is in Maclean's by Mark Steyn. Here. It will disappear after awhile, so check it out.

I myself don't take movies except as light entertainment. I also regard the "documentary film" as, by definition, propaganda - and that includes even ones with which I agree 100%, such as Indoctrinate U. Cognition requires reading, not watching. Anyone who gets their politics or, worse, the confirmation of their politics, from the movies and actors, music and musicians, teachers or professors deserves exactly what they get. Excerpts from Steyn:

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Hollywood shoots itself in the foot:

Its anti-war films may be aimed at Bush,
but what they're really destroying is storytelling

Maclean's
MARK STEYN
November 15, 2007

A few months back, Peter Berg attended a test screening of his new film in California — not Malibu or Beverly Hills, but out in farm country. The Kingdom is about FBI agents (Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, etc.) investigating a terrorist attack on Americans in Saudi Arabia, and finally, about two hours in, the star talent gets to kill a bunch of jihadists. As Entertainment Weekly described it, "the packed house went completely bonkers, erupting in cheers" — and poor old Berg was distraught. "I was nervous it would be perceived as a jingoistic piece of propaganda, which I certainly didn't intend," the director agonized. "I thought, 'Am I experiencing American bloodlust?' "

You really want an answer to that? Okay, here goes: No. It's not American bloodlust. As they say on Broadway, the audience doesn't lie, and, when they're trying to tell you something, it helps not to cover your ears. For all Mr. Berg's pains, The Kingdom was dismissed by the New York Times as "Syriana for dummies." That's to say, instead of explicitly fingering sinister Americans as the bad guys, it merely posited a kind of dull pro forma equivalence between the Yanks and the terrorists. It came out, oh, a week and a half ago and it's already forgotten in the avalanche of anti-war movies released since. There's Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah and Redacted — no, wait, Rendition. No, my mistake. There's a Redacted and a Rendition — one's about American soldiers being rapists, one's about American intelligence officials being torturers. Every Friday night at the multiplex, Mr. and Mrs. America are saying, "Hmm, shall we see the movie where our boys are the torturers? Or the one where our boys are the rapists? How about the film where the heroic soldier refuses to fight? Or the one where he does fight and the army covers up the truth about his death?" And then they go see Fred Claus, which pulled in three times as much money as Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs on both films' opening weekend.

As Roger L. Simon of Pajamas Media (and a screenwriter himself) put it: "Hicks Nix Peaceniks' Pix." These films tank at the box office, and disappear from the shopping malls before you've had time to refill your popcorn, and next Friday there's a brand new critically acclaimed anti-war movie in its place. The faster they fall, the more Hollywood is convinced of the "courage" of its "dissent." Tired of hailing pictures no one goes to see, the New York Times' film critic A. O. Scott now routinely pre-empts accusations that the drearily consistent world view of these works is "anti-American." Of Rendition, he wrote:

"It has timely issues and serious ambitions, and it also has movie stars — Reese Witherspoon with a huge pregnant belly! Meryl Streep with a Southern accent! Jake Gyllenhaal with sad, sleepy eyes! — as well as young romance, breathless chases and violent explosions. Honestly, what could be more American than that?"

Mr. Scott trembles, albeit accidentally, on the brink of a great insight here. Hollywood assumes that if you have enough beautiful stars making out and getting shot at and running up stairwells and diving through windows and outrunning the fireball, that that is sufficiently "American" (as Mr. Scott puts it) that the absence of a heroic narrative won't matter. The movies have divorced the form from the content, or, if you prefer, the telling from the story. You see it most obviously in almost any remake. Take the old 3.10 to Yuma, which chugged in last month, remodelled for the 21st century. The 1957 western was nobody's idea of a masterpiece but it had a moral seriousness: Van Heflin's broke and he'll lose his farm so he agrees to escort a violent felon to meet the train that will take him to prison. He's doing it for the 200 bucks — or so he thinks. But along the way he comes to understand that he's doing it for rather more. When a disaffected sibling of one of Glenn Ford's victims tries to kill him, Heflin prevents him — because, in a civilization as fragile as the young West, he thinks it important that it be the law that dispatches the prisoner.

All that's gone in the new version, with Christian Bale in the Heflin role and Russell Crowe as Ford. For Bale, it's just about the money. Now the guy who tries to intercept the prisoner en route is not a vigilante who wishes to shortcut the law but the law itself — a rogue cop as brutal as the man he pursues. Oh, and the 2007 3.10 also gives us a Pinkerton agent who enjoys killing Injuns just for kicks, which even Russell Crowe primly draws the line at. There's no moral universe, just a rotten state in which wickedness and violence are tempered only by degrees of politically correct squeamishness.

A decade or so back at some confab at Paramount, I met Lionel Chetwynd, a writer and producer who was raised in Montreal and in his pre-showbiz days served in the Black Watch (the Royal Highland Regiment), in the course of which he met several Canadian veterans of the Dieppe raid. After recounting their story one night at a party in Malibu, he was invited to pitch it as a project to some network honcho. He laid out the bones of the plot — a suicidal dry run for D-Day against a heavily fortified European port.

"Who's the enemy?" asked the network exec.

"Hitler," said Chetwynd. "The Nazis."

"No, no, no," she pressed. "Who's the real enemy?"

"It was the first time I realized," Chetwynd later told Cathy Seipp, "that for many people, evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves." Who's the real enemy? Ike. Churchill. The Imperial General Staff. Us.

Ed Driscoll, who's been scanning the shrivelled horizon of an ever more parochial movie industry for some years now, likes to cite that anecdote as a kind of shorthand for the Hollywood aesthetic: who's the real enemy? In this season's crop of movies, the enemy is never al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Baathists . . . Sure, they're out there somewhere at the fringe of events, but they're just Hitchcock's MacGuffin — the pretext for the real story. And that means the heroes can never be, say, a bunch of U.S. Marines who leap from their Humvee on the outskirts of Ramadi because something goofy's going on. No, the heroes have to be dogged journalists or crusading lawyers or obstinate wives who refuse to swallow the official explanation. And the real enemy are renegade government officials, covert agencies, right-wing senators, Halliburton. And, unsurprisingly, despite the unpopularity of Bush and the Iraq war, the public simply doesn't buy the idea of their country as a 24/7 cover-up for rape, torture and war profiteering.

Which brings us back to those yelps of delight when the Americans clobbered the jihadists two hours into the test screening of The Kingdom. Pace Peter Berg, it's not "bloodlust": if you want that, you're best to stick to the amoral fetishization of violence in the 3.10 remake. What the preview crowd were telling Berg is, hey, we'd love to see one film where our guys kick serious terrorist butt — and there isn't one, and there hasn't been one for six long years. If you buy the argument that Hollywood's anti-Americanism derives necessarily from its role as purveyor of entertainment to the entire planet, well, so what? Terrorists killed a bunch of people in Bali, Madrid, London. Alongside the kick-ass Americans, sign Hugh Grant as an MI6 agent and Penelope Cruz as his Spanish dolly bird and Cate Blanchett as the head of the Australian SAS and Russell Crowe as her Kiwi bit of rough. As long as the enemy's the enemy, and not a Dick Cheney subsidiary. It's fine to show the American war machine warts and all, but Hollywood is showing only the warts — and, even if you stick perky little Reese Witherspoon in the middle of it, it's still just another pustulating carbuncle.

***
(Etc.)

US policy toward Pakistan-in-turmoil: Steyn & the WSJ

Like everyone else, I've been trying to sort out the best approach for US policy toward Pakistan. The two most useful takes - I am not saying I agree 100%, still talking with people, reading and thinking about it, as unfortunately I have been for years now - are Saturday, November 10, 2007 WSJ editorial, here (open link for the moment), and Mark Steyn's syndicated column from Saturday, November 10, 2007, here, in the OC Register.

Excerpts from Steyn:

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Everyone's an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know everything: Gen. Musharraf should do this; he shouldn't have done that; the State Department should lean on him to do the other.

"It is time for him to go," pronounced Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach. Every foreign policy genius has his Hollywood pitch ready: "If we're not careful, we're going to see the same thing happen that happened in Iran," warned Dan Burton, R-Ind. Pakistan 2007 is a remake of Persia 1979 with the general as the shah, etc.

Well, I dunno. It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate when offering advice to Islamabad.

Gen. Musharraf is – as George S. Kaufman remarked when the Germans invaded Russia – shooting without a script. But that's because he presides over a country that defies the neatness of scripted narratives. In the days after 9/11, George W. Bush told the world that you're either with us or against us. Musharraf said he was with us, which was jolly decent of him considering that 99.9999 percent of his people are against us. In the teeth of that glum reality, he's rode a difficult tightrope with some skill.

As John Negroponte, U.S. deputy secretary of state, put it, aside from America "no country has done more in terms of inflicting damage and punishment on the Taliban and al-Qaida since 9/11" – which, given the proportion of the population that loathes America and actively supports the Taliban and al-Qaida, is not unimpressive.

Nevertheless, in Washington and the media, the assumption is that the wheel has now come off Musharraf's highwire act. Time for Pakistan to go back to democratically elected unicyclists, like the charming and glamorous Benazir Bhutto, who plays note-perfect in the salons of the West but degenerates into just another third-rate hack from one of the world's most corrupt political classes once she's back greasing the wheel in Pakistan itself.

Furthermore, confident believers in the usual dreary pendulum of Pakistani politics – corrupt democrats, followed by authoritarian generals, followed by corrupt democrats – overlook how profoundly the country's changed. Its political dynamic has a new player: Islamism. Miss Bhutto says, oh, don't worry about that, it's a lot of hooey cooked up by Musharraf to persuade Washington to prop him up for another half-decade.

Really?

Pakistan is both a nuclear power and a nation that cannot enforce sovereignty over significant chunks of its territory. Large tracts are run by the Taliban. The organization responsible for perpetrating the bloodiest assault ever on the U.S. mainland is holed up there and all but untouchable. The air routes between Karachi and Heathrow, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow are the vital conduit between the jihad's ideological redoubts and the wider world.

What do the perpetrators of the Daniel Pearl beheading and the London Tube bombing and the thwarted martyrs of innumerable other plots all have in common? Pakistan.

Fritz Gelowicz, arrested a few weeks ago in Europe, is an ethnic German who converted to Islam and graduated from a Pakistani terrorist camp. Unlike Britain and Canada, Germany has no longer-standing imperial ties with Pakistan, yet a ramshackle economically inconsequential basket-case of a state now has ideological converts in almost every corner of the world.

Mohammed Umer Farooq is a conventional first-generation moderate immigrant to the West who serves happily as pharmacist at the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry base in Alberta. By contrast, his daughter Nada Farooq says she "hates Canada" and was involved in a plot to behead the prime minister. In North America, Britain, Scandinavia, Australia and Pakistan itself, elderly grandparents who practice the Indian subcontinent's traditional Sufi Islam have seen their grandchildren embrace hard-line Deobandi Islam, essentially a local variant of Wahhabism … and then sell its virtues to pasty-faced white blokes with names like Fritz.

The Bhuttos and the Sharifs, their sometime rivals, sometime allies of convenience, couldn't run the country competently before it got hollowed out by the radicals. But the experts assure us they're now the answer to the woes of a nuclear powder keg.

Pakistan is not Persia. For one thing, it's a country only 60 years old whose slapdash creation was one of the worst disasters of British imperial policy. Yet even those who thought so at the time would be astonished to find that, a mere couple of generations later, a regional afterthought is not only a nuclear power that has dispersed its technology around the planet but also a driving force of the world's first global insurgency. If Gen. Musharraf is shooting without a script, what would you do if stuck in a toxic soap opera where the incoherent plot twists pile up with every passing decade?

It may well be that a Bhutto restoration will be the happy ending that foreign-policy "realists" predict. But it's more likely that a return to traditional levels of democratic corruption will cramp the economic interests of much of the military and lead key factions to make common cause with the Islamists – as Pakistan's intelligence service did with the Taliban. I don't know for sure, and nor does anyone else. But sometimes it helps to bet on form. And, given the past 60 years, the real question is how bad things will be after Musharraf. This thing can't be scripted, in Washington or anywhere else.

Mark Steyn on Ahmadinejad at Columbia University

Mark Steyn on Ahmadinejad at Columbia, here. (For a blog comment, my forwarding of it to Steyn, and Steyn's reply, see the very end of this post.) Excerpts:

***
Saturday, September 29, 2007
OC Register

Democracies talk, tyrannies act

By MARK STEYN

"I'm proud of my university today," Stina Reksten, a 28-year-old Columbia graduate student from Norway, told the New York Times. "I don't want to confuse the very dire human rights situation in Iran with the issue here, which is freedom of speech. This is about academic freedom."

Isn't it always? But enough about Iran, let's talk about me! The same university that shouted down an American anti-illegal-immigration activist and the same university culture that just deemed former Harvard honcho Larry Summers too misogynist to be permitted on campus is now congratulating itself over its commitment to "academic freedom." True, renowned Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo is not happy. "They can have any fascist they want there," said professor Zimbardo, "but this seems egregious." But, hey, don't worry: He was protesting not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presence at Columbia but Donald Rumsfeld's presence at the Hoover Institution.

At some point during this past week, it was decided that the relevant Ahmadinejad comparison was to Nikita Krushchev. The Soviet leader toured America in 1960, was taken to a turkey farm, paid a visit to Frank Sinatra and Co. on the set of "Can-Can" and pronounced the movie "decadent." And yet the republic survived. As one of my most distinguished fellow columnists, Peggy Noonan, put it in the Wall Street Journal, Krushchev's visit reminded the world that "we are the confident nation." And, as several e-mailers observed, warming to Noonan's theme, back then hysterical right-wing ninnies didn't get their panties in a twist just because a man dedicated to the destruction of our way of life was in town for a couple of days.

Whether or not this was a more "confident" nation in 1960, it's certainly a more post-modern nation now. I don't know whether Stina Reksten, as a 28-year old Norwegian, can be held up as an exemplar of American youth, but she certainly seems to have mastered the lingo: We've invited the president of Iran to speak but let's not confuse "the very dire human-rights situation" – or his nuclear program, or his Holocaust denial, or his role in the seizing of the U.S. Embassy hostages, or his government's role in the deaths of American troops and Iraqi civilians – with the more important business of applauding ourselves for our celebration of "academic freedom."

So much of contemporary life is about opportunities for self-congratulation. Risk-free dissent is the default mode of our culture, and extremely seductive. If dissent means refusing to let the Bush administration bully you into wearing a flag lapel pin, why, then Katie Couric (bravely speaking out on this issue just last week) is the new Mandela! If Rumsfeld is a "fascist." then anyone can fight fascism. It's no longer about the secret police kicking your door down and clubbing you to a pulp. Well, OK, it is if you're a Buddhist monk in Burma. But they're a long way away, and it's all a bit complicated and foreign, and let's not "confuse the very dire human rights situation" in Hoogivsastan with an opportunity to celebrate our courage in defending "academic freedom" in America. Ahmadinejad must occasionally have felt he was appearing in a matinee of "A Chance To Hear [Insert Name Of Enemy Head Of State Here]." Could have been Chavez, could have been Mullah Omar, could have been Herr ReichsfuhrerHitler himself, as Columbia's Dean John Coatsworth proudly boasted on television.

Lots of prime ministers and diplomats accepted invitations to meet with Hitler, and generally the meetings went very well – except for one occasion when Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, was greeted by the little chap with the mustache, mistook him for the butler, and handed him his coat. But even that faux pas is a testament to how normal thugs can appear in social situations. Civilized nations like chit-chatting, having tea, holding debates, talking talking talking. Tyrannies like terrorizing people, torturing people, murdering people, doing doing doing. It's easier for the doers to pass themselves off as talkers then for the talkers to rouse themselves to do anything.

As witness this last week. Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, was evidently taken aback by the criticism he got for inviting Ahmadinejad and so found himself backed into what, for a conventional soft-leftie of academe, was a ferocious denunciation of his star guest, dwelling at length on Iran's persecution of minorities, murder of dissidents, sponsorship of terrorism, nuclear ambitions, genocidal threats toward Israel, etc. For a warmup act, Bollinger pretty much frosted up the joint. The Iranian leader sat through the intro with a plastic smile, and then said: "I shall not begin by being affected by this unfriendly treatment." He offered many illuminating insights: There are, he declared, no homosexuals in Iran. Not one. Where are they? On a weekend visit to Kandahar to see the new production of "Mame"? Alas, there was no time for follow-up questions.

And afterwards Bollinger got raves even from the right for "speaking truth to power." But so what? It's like Noel Coward delivering a series of devastating put-downs to Hitler. The Fuhrer's mad as hell but at the end of the afternoon he goes back to killing, and dear Noel goes back to singing "The Stately Homes Of England." Ahmadinejad goes back to doing – to persecuting, to murdering, to terrorizing, to nuclearizing – and Bollinger cuts out his press clippings and puts them on the fridge.

The other day, National Review's Jay Nordlinger was musing about our habit of referring to some benighted part of the world's "humanitarian needs" and wondered when we'd stopped using the term "human needs," which is, after all, what food, water and shelter are. And his readers wrote in to state the obvious: That "humanitarian" label gives top billing not to the distant, Third World victim but the generous Western donor – the "humanitarian" relief effort, the "humanitarian" organizations, the NGOs, the Western charities: It's about us, not them. Bill Clinton's new bestseller on charity is called "Giving" – because it's better to give than to receive, and that's certainly true if the giver is busying himself with some ineffectual feel-good "Save Darfur" fundraiser while the recipient is on the receiving end of the Janjaweed's machetes. The Sudanese government appreciates that, as long as we're allowed to feel good about ourselves and to participate in "humanitarian relief," the killing can go on until there's no one left to kill. Likewise, Ahmadinejad knows that, as along as we're allowed to do what we do best – talk and talk and talk, whether at Columbia or in EU negotiations – his regime can quietly get on with its nuclear program.

These men understand the self-absorption of advanced democracies. The difference between Winston Churchill and Ward Churchill, another famous beneficiary of "academic freedom" who called the 9/11 dead "little Eichmanns," is that for Sir Winston talking was a call to action while for poseurs like professor Churchill it's a substitute for it.

The pen is not mightier than the sword if your enemy is confident you will never use anything other than your pen. Sometimes it's not about "freedom of speech," but about freedom. Ask an Iranian homosexual. If you can find one.

***
THE PERSECUTION OF HOMOSEXUALS

Dear Mark,

I posted a bit of your Columbia U Iran column up on my international law blog - well, quite a lot, actually - well, probably violated copyright law, to be honest - and received the following quite serious response back in the blog comments. (See below the asterisks.)

I am big fan of yours - something which caused a senior editor of ... well let's just say a very important book review to shake his head and say, "Ken, you have almost such exquisite taste, but you have this weakness for Mark Steyn" and, he added, "and AA Gill." Quite. All best. KA.

Anonymous [in the comments] said...

"Mark, I must be a little older than you. First of all, I remember the persecution of homosexuals in the US right into the 1970's. And, being a San Franciscan, I remember the national outrage at my city's adoption of gay culture in the 1980's. That wasn't so long ago, Mark. And now an Iranian leader from a different culture is mocked for not recognizing homosexuality in Iran. You know, it's quite possible he just doesn't know any.

"I can tell you this, Mark. I lived in Iran in 1975. Its people are in many ways the same as the rest of the world. Its culture is different, but there are a good many people there. The nation has suffered the trauma of a revolution and then had a terrible war inflicted upon it for eight long, bloody years. Iran is easily criticized from afar, from a Western perspective. But Mark, until you've visited a land and its people, preferably living there for a spell, your criticism is merely the passing off of opinions generated by the words and writings of others, many times told from the vantage point of bias and special interest.

"By the way, Mark, have you ever heard Ward Churchill speak in public? I've heard him speak at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco's North Beach. Again, all you've done here is recycle a quote you've read from sources other than your own. When you sit and listen to Mr. Churchill, you gain an understanding of his personal perspective. You may not agree with him, but that's an insight you would make first hand.

"My advice is to gain some firsthand knowledge before simply regurgitating opinions on subjects that interest to you."

MARK REPLIES:

Your commenter's a twit. He "remembers the persecution of homosexuals in the US right into the 1970s"? Okay, how many homosexuals were executed in New York or San Francisco or even Salt Lake City in the 1970s? That's what happens to homosexuals in Iran: they get sentenced to death. The inability to distinguish between "persecution" US-style and Iranian-style is a sign of a moral frivolity that would shame anyone who gave it a moment's thought. Oh, and by the way, Iran-wise, I have plenty of hands-on experience.

Steyn on the disappearance of 'Alms for Jihad'

Creeping one way multiculturalism is so normal today that one hardly notices. But Cambridge University Press's ignoble decision to pulp Alms for Jihad and take the extraordinary step of asking libraries around the world to remove it from their shelves, without so much as an effort to defend against libel charges threatened by someone who, on pretty good evidence, is a solid part of the wealthy Saudi funders of jihad and virulent Islamism around the world - well, that is important.

One thing CUP's unseemly-eager surrender especially signals is the direction that this kind of one way multiculturalism takes Britain. An ever more illiberal Britain, gradually shutting down its own liberal institutions through the manipulation by illiberals of the very mechanisms of its liberalism - yet loudly announcing how liberal it is and, as supposed evidence of that liberalism, pointing to the use of its liberal institutions to stifle dissent from its multiculturalism. Remarkable. It really is one's social and cultural constitution-as-suicide pact.

Yet, to be fair to Cambridge University Press, English libel law makes it nearly impossible to fight off a determined billionaire. Each defendent can be picked off separately. On the other hand, there is no evidence that Cambridge UP would have fought back in any case.

Mark Steyn (the full article is worth reading because it gives essential background to the story of jihadist funding.) Here.

***
from:

Mark Steyn
Orange County Register
August 5, 2007

The Vanishing Jihad Exposes

... So why would the Cambridge University Press, one of the most respected publishers on the planet, absolve Khalid bin Mahfouz, his family, his businesses and his charities to a degree that neither (to pluck at random) the U.S., French, Albanian, Swiss and Pakistani governments would be prepared to do?

Because English libel law overwhelmingly favors the plaintiff. And like many other big-shot Saudis, Sheikh Mahfouz has become very adept at using foreign courts to silence American authors – in effect, using distant jurisdictions to nullify the First Amendment. He may be a wronged man, but his use of what the British call "libel chill" is designed not to vindicate his good name but to shut down the discussion, which is why Cambridge University Press made no serious attempt to mount a defense. He's one of the richest men on the planet, and they're an academic publisher with very small profit margins. But, even if you've got a bestseller, your pockets are unlikely to be deep enough: "House Of Saud, House Of Bush" did boffo biz with the anti-Bush crowd in America, but there's no British edition – because Sheikh Mahfouz had indicated he was prepared to spend what it takes to challenge it in court, and Random House decided it wasn't worth it.

We've gotten used to one-way multiculturalism: The world accepts that you can't open an Episcopal or Congregational church in Jeddah or Riyadh, but every week the Saudis can open radical mosques and madrassahs and pro-Saudi think-tanks in London and Toronto and Dearborn, Mich., and Falls Church, Va. And their global reach extends a little further day by day, inch by inch, in the lengthening shadows, as the lights go out one by one around the world.
Suppose you've got a manuscript about the Saudis. Where are you going to shop it? Think Cambridge University Press will be publishing anything anytime soon?

What would Bart do? And the Baroque violin music of Nicola Matteis

The Baroque violin music of Nicola Matteis (b Naples ?, d London? 1714? Although not much is known about his birth and death, don't feel too badly for him - he came from Italy, married a rich widow in London and retired wealthy from the music scene, which is why not so much is known) is mostly virtuosic and pretty, rather than deep and beautiful. Ornamental and diverting, not profound. On the other hand, the second movement of the suite in A major, Book IV, Nos. 1-11, the 2 minute long Andamento con divisione is so sweet without being overwhelming that it just stops me on the album until I've played it three or four times in a row. There's something about the ostinato in three - very hard to explain except that I can play it over and over. (The Arcadian Academy, on Harmonia Mundi, here.)

Meanwhile, I am sitting here on a Saturday morning deep in the midst of writing my TLS review essay of ... the Simpsons Movie. Knowing that I will be launching something that, although unlikely to encounter too many fanatics among the readers of the TLS, nonetheless will be likely scrutinized at some point by some hard core fan, so I have been online making sure the details are right.

My review is filled with plot spoilers, I'm afraid. Worse, I am committing the (venal) sin of doing a serious review of a fun and funny summer movie, a cartoon no less. I am pairing it with a review of my colleague Angela J. Davis's new, brilliant book on the overwheening power of prosecutors in America, Arbitrary Justice (Oxford UP 2007). I should have included this in my reading post, earlier, but didn't because I knew I'd be reviewing the book - this book is must-reading for anyone trying to understand what has gone so dreadfully wrong with street-level American justice. As regular readers of this blog know, as some sort of libertarian conservative, I am willing to defend many institutions and policies in America that progressives find indefensible - the war on terror, the war in Iraq, not infrequently the Bush administration - but the American criminal justice system is not one of them, and that fundamentally for the reasons Professor Davis says.

Combining the Simpsons and Professor Davis might turn out to be a bad idea, from the craft of review writing point of view - downmarketing Professor Davis's intellectual and legal policy tour de force while making the Simpson out to be more than it is. But while watching and laughing my way through the movie, I kept being struck by the thought: that T-shirt I used to see in the 90s, "What Would Bart Do?" (checking Google, I see you could get the slogan on a thong, too) today should be replaced with "What Would They Do To Bart?"

The latter not as cute and catchy as the former, granted. But in today's world of apparently unconstrained prosecutorial power, possibly more relevant. Godalmighty, what do you say about someone sentenced ten years for consensual oral sex with a fifteen year when he was seventeen and in high school in Georgia - finally, finally overturned by a judge after pretty much every other appeal had been exhausted - except that he was pursued by a crazed and unaccountable prosecutor? And then the butt swatting thirteen year old middle schoolers pursued by a mad, unaccountable, self-righteous prosecutor in Oregon on felony sexual assault charges designed to put the boys, as he said in interviews, on the sexual offenders register for child molesters and pedophiles for the rest of their lives. Life imitates a Simpsons cartoon - without necessarily the happy cartoon endings.

Mark Steyn on multiculturalism in Britain and the July 7 bombings

From the several columns Mark Steyn wrote two years ago in London's Daily Telegraph following the July 7 London bombings, or, against multiculturalism:

It has been sobering this past week watching some of my "woollier" colleagues (in Vicki Woods's self-designation) gradually awake to the realisation that the real suicide bomb is "multiculturalism". Its remorseless tick-tock, suddenly louder than the ethnic drumming at an anti-globalisation demo, drove poor old Boris Johnson into rampaging around this page last Thursday like some demented late-night karaoke one-man Fiddler on the Roof, stamping his feet and bellowing, "Tradition! Tradition!" Boris's plea for more Britishness was heartfelt and valiant, but I'm not sure I'd bet on it. The London bombers were, to the naked eye, assimilated - they ate fish 'n' chips, played cricket, sported appalling leisurewear. They'd adopted so many trees we couldn't see they lacked the big overarching forest - the essence of identity, of allegiance. As I've said before, you can't assimilate with a nullity - which is what multiculturalism is.

So, if Islamist extremism is the genie you're trying to put back in the bottle, it doesn't help to have smashed the bottle. As the death of the Eurofanatic Ted Heath reminds us, in modern Britain even a "conservative" prime minister thinks nothing of obliterating ancient counties and imposing on the populace fantasy jurisdictions - "Avon", "Clwyd" and (my personal favourite in its evocative neo-Stalinism) "Central Region" - and an alien regulatory regime imported from the failed polities of Europe. The 7/7 murderers are described as "Yorkshiremen", but, of course, there is no Yorkshire: Ted abolished that, too.

Sir Edward's successor, Mr Blair, said on the day of the bombing that terrorists would not be allowed to "change our country or our way of life". Of course not. That's his job - from hunting to Europeanisation. Could you reliably say what aspects of "our way of life" Britain's ruling class, whether pseudo-Labour like Mr Blair or pseudo-Conservative like Sir Ted, wish to preserve? The Notting Hill Carnival? Not enough, alas.

Consider the Bishop of Lichfield, who at Evensong, on the night of the bombings, was at pains to assure his congregants: "Just as the IRA has nothing to do with Christianity, so this kind of terror has nothing to do with any of the world faiths." It's not so much the explicit fatuousness of the assertion so much as the broader message it conveys: we're the defeatist wimps; bomb us and we'll apologise to you. That's why in Britain the Anglican Church is in a death-spiral and Islam is the fastest-growing religion. There's no market for a faith that has no faith in itself. And as the Church goes so goes the state: why introduce identity cards for a nation with no identity?

It was the Prime Minister's wife, you'll recall, who last year won a famous court victory for Shabina Begum, as a result of which schools across the land must now permit students to wear the full "jilbab" - ie, Muslim garb that covers the entire body except the eyes and hands. Ms Booth hailed this as "a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry". It seems almost too banal to observe that such an extreme preservation of Miss Begum's Muslim identity must perforce be at the expense of any British identity. Nor, incidentally, is Miss Begum "preserving" any identity: she's of Bangladeshi origin, and her adolescent adoption of the jilbab is a symbol of the Arabisation of South Asian (and African and European) Islam that's at the root of so many problems. It's no more part of her inherited identity than my five-year- old dressing up in his head-to-toe Darth Vader costume, to which at a casual glance it's not dissimilar.

Is it "bigoted" to argue that the jilbab is a barrier to acquiring the common culture necessary to any functioning society? Is it "prejudiced" to suggest that in Britain a Muslim woman ought to reach the same sartorial compromise as, say, a female doctor in Bahrain? Apparently so, according to Cherie Booth.

One of the striking features of the post-9/11 world is the minimal degree of separation between the so-called "extremists" and the establishment: Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, gives $130,000 to accomplices of the 9/11 terrorists; the head of the group that certifies Muslim chaplains for the US military turns out to be a bagman for terrorists; one of the London bombers gets given a tour of the House of Commons by a Labour MP. The Guardian hires as a "trainee journalist" a member of Hizb ut Tahir, "Britain's most radical Islamic group" (as his own newspaper described them) and in his first column post-7/7 he mocks the idea that anyone could be "shocked" at a group of Yorkshiremen blowing up London: "Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks" - or the bus blows, or the Tube vaporises. Fellow Guardian employee David Foulkes, who was killed in the Edgware Road blast, would no doubt be heartened to know he'd died for the cause of Muslim "sassiness".

But among all these many examples of the multiculti mainstream ushering the extremists from the dark fringe to the centre of western life, there is surely no more emblematic example than that of Shabina Begum, whose victory over the school dress code was achieved with the professional support of both the wife of the Prime Minister who pledges to defend "our way of life" and of Hizb ut Tahir, a group which (according to the German Interior Minister) "supports violence as a means to realise political goals" such as a worldwide caliphate and (according to the BBC) "urges Muslims to kill Jewish people". What does an "extremist" have to do to be too extreme for Cherie Booth or the Guardian?

Oh, well. Back to business as usual. In yesterday's Independent, Dave Brown had a cartoon showing Bush and Blair as terrorists boarding the Tube to Baghdad. Ha-ha. The other day in Thailand, where 800 folks have been killed by Islamists since the start of the year, two Laotian farm workers were beheaded. I suppose that's Bush and Blair's fault, too.

I'd like to think my "woolly liberal" colleague Vicki Woods and the woolly sorta-conservative Boris Johnson represent the majority. If they do, you've got a sporting chance. But in the end Cherie Booth and Dave Brown and the Bishop of Lichfield will get you killed. Best of British, old thing.

Two years later, some observers are hoping that things have shifted in Britain. Senior political figures in Britain have spoken out against full female Muslim coverage garb of precisely the kind in which feminist human rights lawyer Cherie Blair discovered such a smashing victory. Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis - two liberals whose antipathy towards the political orthodoxy of multiculturalism is not in question - have written columns expressing the hope that Jack Straw's position, despite it being widely reviled in Britain itself, represents the hope of a new policy in Britain.

Well, I should like to believe that as much as Hitchens and Amis, but I think it is hoping against hope. I had a conversation with a friend in London a couple of weeks ago, and I remarked to him that knowledgeable friends in Paris view London as the capital of Islamist terrorism, the feeder from Pakistan, and the incubator of terrorism in its deadly combination of liberal protections for terrorism's ideological support groups and multicultural refusal to address an ideology that proposes to use liberalism to dispose of itself. My London friend assured me that the July 7 bombings had been a wakeup call, no more business as usual. Two weeks after my family and I have left London, the attempted car bombings a few blocks from our hotel in Piccadilly. The New York Times, on little evidence except its own wishful narrative, assures us that the doctors involved had been radicalized by the Iraq war: blame it on Bush and Blair.

Steyn remarked in a column back at the time of the New Jersey terror plot that every terrorist plot looks ridiculous if caught in the planning stages. The terrorists look like idiots for thinking they could succeed. Alas, it all looks very different if they do succeed. Had the 9-11 plotters been caught midway through the planning, what would our collective public response have been? God, what morons for thinking they could hijack not just one but four planes and use them as human-filled missiles against the largest buildings in New York. In the event, who were the morons? The most frightening thing about the most recent UK events is how extraordinarily close even some fairly amateur terrorists got to succeeding - concrete barriers at the airport, and someone thankfully observant in Piccadilly. But they got nearly all the way to home plate and were stopped by the frailest of last-stage tactical defenses, not by any kind of coherent counterterrorism strategy. Where were the vaunted domestic intelligence services? Might the mighty strictures of multiculturalism made surveillance rather more difficult than it should have been?

Meanwhile, the strictures of multiculturalism in the United States - the insistence that despite the obvious facts of where Islamist violence incubates, counterterrorism measures can take no account of that fact - lead to a copying of the dumbest of UK measures, the penchant for putting surveillance cameras everywhere. To record the carnage. To indulge the foolish idea that counterterrorism can and should consist of after-the-fact criminal justice, which is all that a video camera recording the action can hope to do, when posted on every possible location in a large city. It can't help you prevent terrorism - it merely announces that you don't intend to try to stop it in advance, but to go after people by sifting through the rubble and body parts afterwards.

Welcome to the world of on-defense, not offense, counterterrorism. If your counterterrorism policy is defensive, domestic, and essentially at-home, then be prepared either for a massive, general invasion of privacy in order to try and catch terrorists after the fact. And it still won't be effective, because the assumption of criminal law is deterrence through after the fact punishment. What does it mean if your terrorists are not deterrable?

The US under the next administration as 'meek multilateralist'?

This is from the conclusion of a new essay - remarks, really, prepared for a conference at which I was unfortunately unable to appear, and then revised for a seminar on human rights at NYU - appearing in Fordham International Law Review one of these days. It will be substantially edited from this form, but the point is still basically the same - the US in a new administration as 'meek multilateralist' - and why that is not an unalloyed good, even for those who would prefer the US to loom less large upon the world.

***
The conventional wisdom seems to be that the US has quite exhausted itself with war – perhaps not unlike its exhaustion with war following Vietnam. Not everyone shares that view, but conventional wisdom says no more wars for a good while.[1] From the European point of view, that does not make the US security guarantee any less good – better even – because for Europe, US counterterrorism wars simply stir up Islamist terrorists in its own cities, places that can’t be attacked by the 82nd Airborne. What it most likely leads to is a return to the early Clinton era, perhaps with an added air, in a Democratic administration at least, of contrition for the wicked Bush years, and expressed as ‘meek multilateralism’.

But recall what that meek multilateralism served in those early Clinton years. It was a get along, go along foreign policy not really interested in anything foreign other than trade. It was willing, most of the time, to say all the right multilateralist things. It was always willing to feel everyone’s pain for anything out in the world. But it was much less willing to act. It wanted to be multilateralist precisely in order (partly, but only partly, through its lip service compliance with all those international norms), to try and be just another power in the multilateral gaggle of nation-states, whose compliance is partly lip service, too.

Being 'just one of the guys', so to speak, doesn’t work for the United States, of course, and it doesn’t work for the rest of the world either. What, rely, really rely, on the promise of collective security through the UN? Who are we kidding? Within a few years the Clinton administration was in a different mode – but it wasn’t willingly and it wasn’t for lack of desire to loom small on the world stage. We therefore face, under either a Democratic or Republican administration, the possibility of a return to a form of meek multilateralism by the United States. It might actually be more compliant with international law norms. It might be much more respectful of international law as the international law professors see it. It would almost certainly be more soothing to the sensitivities, so offended by the Bush administration, of the international community. One might wish that the US would essentially submit its power to supervision and control by its allies and friends and take instruction from them, but that seems unlikely. (One reason is that although the United States is fully capable of moral and legal mistakes, submitting one’s power to the supervision even of one’s friends invites – quite apart from its preposterousness from a strictly realist standpoint – the “give a mouse a cookie” problem, the inevitable tendency to demand more and more of the superpower as a condition of continuing to like it.)[2]

The actual choice is much more likely this. On the one hand, a meek multilateralism that masks a deep desire to ignore, at least for some quite possibly critical years, the responsibilities and obligations of the superpower, in order not to be seen to be exercising its privileges, and also frankly to lick its wounds. Or, on the other hand, the robust assertion of American exceptionalism, even to the point of special privilege, arrogant as that always in fact is, and infuriating to the rest of the US’s friends and allies, as that always is, and less compliant and respectful of others’ views of international law and the international system, such as it is.

The latter choice may not rise, in a new administration, to the Bush administration’s specially calibrated levels of bellicosity, but it would not be a return to the early 1990s, either. Think carefully upon which you prefer.

Notes:

[1] For example, Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan, two prominent foreign policy analysts of the center left and right, respectively, are releasing a joint paper arguing that the United States will be no less bellicose in a new administration than under Bush. See Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan, “America and the Use of Force,” Stanley Foundation Project, Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide, forthcoming 2007.

[2] I leave aside here, as too large a topic for these remarks, the currently popular idea of a “caucus of the democracies” that might provide a robust yet less evidently insincere forum in which the United States could argue its views, find greater grounds of agreement, and generally have a place among those who share its fundamental values against which to check its own behavior and achieve some agreement and coordination with others.

***
Let me add this column from Mark Steyn.
***
Fortress America's gate is open

(http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/382787,CST-EDT-steyn13.article)
May 13, 2007
Chicago Suntimes

MARK STEYN

Most terrorists seem like bumbling losers if they're caught before the act: That's certainly true of the Fort Dix jihadists who took their terrorist training DVD to the local audio store to be copied. It was also true of the Islamists arrested in Toronto last year for plotting to behead the prime minister, one of whose cell members had a bride who wanted him to sign a prenup committing him to jihad. The Heathrow plotters arrested while planning to blow up U.S.-bound airliners included a Muslim convert who'd started out as the son of a British Conservative Party official with a P. G. Wodehouse double-barreled name and a sister who was a Victoria's Secret model and ex-wife of tennis champ Yanick Noah.

But then Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 gang would have seemed pretty funny if you'd run into them in that lap-dance club they went to before the big day where the girls remembered them only as very small tippers. Most terrorists are jokes until the bomb goes off.

So, when we're fortunate enough to catch them in advance, it's worth pausing to consider what they tell us about the broader threat we face. According to genius New York Times headline writers, "Religion Guided Three Held In Fort Dix Plot." You don't say. Any religion in particular?

Well, the trio were Muslims, but Albanian Muslims -- i.e., they weren't Arabs and didn't have names like Mohammed and Abdullah (though their accomplices did). Even if Amer- ica were minded to profile, it's harder to profile against chaps with names like "Shain Duka" (Fort Dix) or "Rich- ard Reid" (the shoebomber) or "Jer- maine Lindsay" (a July 7 Tube bomb- er) or "Muriel Degauque" (a Belgian lady who self-detonated in a suicide attack on U.S. forces in Iraq) or "Jack Roche" (an Australian arrested for plotting to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Canberra).

Second, the young Duka brothers are "radical Muslim" sons in a family of otherwise "moderate Muslim" oldsters. That, too, fits a pattern of de-assimilation, of young Western Muslims far more implacable and hostile than their parents and grandparents. The London bombers were British subjects born and bred, radicalized in the vacuum of contemporary multiculturalism. One of the Toronto plotters had a father-in-law who was the pharmacist at the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry base. The Princess Pats have done sterling work in Afghanistan, and pop supports their mission. But his daughter doesn't, and she named his grandchild after a Chechen terrorist killed by the Russians.

Third, what then radicalized so many Western Muslims? Answer: in many cases, the Balkans. When Yugoslavia collapsed 15 years ago, Jacques Poos told the Americans to butt out: "The hour of Europe has come!" he declared confidently. Poos was the foreign minister of Luxembourg, a country as big as your hot tub, but he chanced to be holding the European Union's rotating "presidency" at the time and, as it happened, the Americans were very happy to butt out. "We don't have a dog in this fight," said then-secretary of state, James Baker.

Well, the hour of Europe came and went, and a couple of hundred thousand corpses later the EU was only too happy for Americans to butt back in again. So NATO bombed Christian Serbs in defense of Albanian Muslims, and a fat lot of good it did if the Duka brothers are any indication.
In theory, Baker was right. But out there in the Balkans, if you're one of the dogs in the fight, great-power evenhandedness can seem pretty one-handed by the time you hear about it. Don't take my word for it. Here's Osama bin Laden: "The British are responsible for destroying the Caliphate system. They are the ones who created the Palestinian problem. They are the ones who created the Kashmiri problem. They are the ones who put the arms embargo on the Muslims of Bosnia so that 2 million Muslims were killed."

Whoa, hold up there: How come a list of imperial interventions wound up with a bit of non-imperial non-intervention? Because, for serious nations, even not taking sides is seen as, in effect, taking sides. What was the single biggest factor in the radicalization of British Muslims? Omar Sheikh, convicted in Karachi for the kidnapping and beheading of Daniel Pearl, is British -- a Westernized non-observant chess-playing pop-listening beer-drinking London School of Economics student, until he was fired up by the massacres of Bosnian Muslims. And, while Europe dithered as the mountain of corpses piled up, Saudi money poured in, transforming the relatively mild Balkan Islam into something far more virulent. Look at the change in Muslim architecture in the region over the last 15 years: They build Wahhabist mosques now. Unlike the State Department complaceniks, the Islamists understand there is no stability.

Tough, you say. So what? Washington still has no dog in these fights. It's time to hunker down in Fortress America. Which brings me to the fourth lesson: What fortress? The three Duka brothers were (if you'll forgive the expression) illegal immigrants. They're not meant to be here. Yet they graduated from a New Jersey high school and they operated two roofing companies and a pizzeria. Think of how often you have to produce your driver's license or Social Security number. But, five years after 9/11, this is still one of the easiest countries in the world in which to establish a functioning but fraudulent identity.

Consider, for example, the post-9/11 ritual of airline security. You have to produce government-issued picture ID to the TSA official. Does that make you feel safer? On that Tuesday morning in September, four of the killers got on board by using picture ID they'd acquired through the "undocumented worker" network in Falls Church, Va. Half the jurisdictions in the United States issue picture ID to people who shouldn't even be in the country, and they issue it as a matter of policy. The Fort Dix boys were pulled over for 19 traffic violations, but because they were in "sanctuary cities," any cop who suspected they were illegals was unable to report them to immigration authorities. Again, as a matter of policy.

On one hand, America creates a vast federal security bureaucracy to prevent another 9/11. On the other hand, American politicians and bureaucrats create a parallel system of education and welfare and health care entitlements, main- taining and expanding a vast network of fraudulent identity that cor- rupts the integrity of almost all state databases. And though it played a part in the killing of 3,000 Americans, leaders of both parties insist nothing can be done to stop it. All we can do is give the Duka brothers "a fast track to citizenship."

The Iranians already are operating in South America's Tri-Border area. Is it the nothing-can-be-done crowd's assumption that the fellows who run armies of the "undocumented" from Mexico into America are just kindhearted human smugglers who'd have nothing to do with jihad even if the price was right? If you don't have borders, you won't have a nation -- and you may find "the jobs Americans won't do" covers a multitude of sins.

Simon Winder's The Man Who Saved Britain - my late night reading

For the past week, my late night reading has been Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond (FSG 2006). It is wonderfully entertaining - thesis is that Ian Fleming's novels provided an essential palliative to 50s and early 60s Britain as it faced one humiliation after another following its heroic victory in the Second World War. It is more a cultural history of Britain through a certain period - the period, from my own standpoint, of most of my British friends, who are old enough to have been growing up as children in exactly this period - than a book about Bond, the Bond movies, or even Bond as cultural icon. It is using Bond as a lens on the period rather than Bond as Bond or even Bond as cultural artifact. Winder says a lot about Bond and the Bond books and early movies, and his readings are wonderfully quirky. But it is his take on Britain itself during this period that actually engages me. I understand my British friends who were children during that period a little better for it - I think, anway.

For one thing, I guess I knew - reading, for example, Tony Judt's wonderful Postwar - that postwar 50s Britain was really, really poor. Poor, and not rebuilt with the vigor and speed of Germany. The contrast Winder makes with the United States is striking. Say what one does about the 50s in America - I was born in 1956 and wasn't conscious of any of this - it was a time of tremendous optimism and growth, people having babies everywhere because they had a confidence about the future, the growth of the suburbs, all that. That was apparently not the state of Britain at all - grimy, decayed, destroyed, poor, straitened, Winder has a nearly limitless set of adjectives to describe this world of hopelessness and the irony of victory.

The curious part is that Winder does not have an original political thought in his head - the main point is that Britain was both doomed to this unhappiness and deserved it as the price for its wicked centuries of empire. The vultures come home to roost. Britain's pain is the price - far too cheap, according to Winder - of having been the self-confident Victorian imperialist. His thesis is entirely a conventional whine - or whinge? - about the wickedness of British imperialism and how Bond is supposed to make the British feel better about being on the receiving end of humiliation as things fall apart after the War. I'm not British, I am not especially anglophile, but there is something entirely goofy, if politically correct, about Winder's sense of historic and cosmic justice. The world which got the East India Company going is not the world of Indian independence, and it doesn't help in the present very much at all - not from the standpoint of social justice today or thinking through present problems - to adopt a sort of transhistorical sense of judgment about how things came to be from centuries ago. It just multiplies the problems of historical injustice to the point of complete paralysis, because everyone got fucked by someone in the past, and trying to fix it all guarantees either permanent war or permanent paralysis. This is not to say one doesn't try to address injustice in the present - along with economic growth for the living, political stability, and a lot of other things - but Winder is smitten in the most conventional PC way with ancient wrongs and rights.

Still, it must be said that for an utterly conventional political thinker of the whining, guilty, self-abasing, apologizing variety, put in the service of everyone else's resentments which are finally Winder's own - well, he manages to put this in prose and expression at a level so far above the common academic herd that it is, for all the vacuity of the political ideas, genuinely a pleasure to read. He manages to make one laugh aloud with pointless political correctness, anti-imperialism, anti-god-knows-what - rather than at it, which is much the normal formulation. He's a terrific writer even devoid of political ideas; he is rescued by the acuity of his cultural observations and his highly original readings of Bond. I never thought I would find myself laughing aloud in a book of this sort, which, in academic hands, ordinarily runs to ressentiment.

Or to put all this another way. I'm not sure I've ever read a book that is quite so cheerily and wittily self-loathing. Self-loathing about oneself, one's country, one's political culture, one's fellow citizens. There is a lot of self-loathing about, of course, but almost never does it come so cheerfully dressed. So much so that it almost - almost, but finally not quite - makes me wonder if Winder actually believes it.

(ps., May 10, 2007. Winder's book has inspired me to pick up an ancient - dating back the 1960s - paperback copy of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I have no idea where it came from - I hope we didn't pay to have it moved from NY to DC ten years ago. I don't recall if Winder mentions it - I'm sure he does - but I can't remember the last time, outside of old-fashioned children's books, where I saw quite so many exclamation points! Every other sentence on some pages seems to have an exclamation point! It seems peculiar because the suave, competent, quiet Bond does not seem like the kind of person to think in sentences ending in exclamation points! But he does!)

(pps, May 10. Once, a couple of years ago, I took my daughter with me on a speaking trip to the LSE - we did tea at the Ritz, the Tower, all the good stuff. At the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, the band struck up the themes to James Bond. I think of this today because Gerard Baker, writing about the Queen's visit to the US this week, noted that along with Rule Brittania, the band at the embassy party struck up the Bond theme as well. The man who saved Britain, indeed?)

***
Update, August 9, 2007. Here, by the way, is what Mark Steyn had to say about this book in the WSJ:

Contemplating the cover of The Man Who Saved Britain – Sean Connery, wearing a tuxedo and a sadistic smile, caressing his cheek with his Walther PPK, as a nubile underclad Sixties dolly bird somewhere down at crotch height nuzzles against his upper thigh…

Where was I? Oh, yes. Bond, James Bond. Contemplating the cover of The Man Who Saved Britain, you’re struck by the apparent ingenuity of Simon Winder’s concept: it is weird, when you think about it, that the great enduring iconic figure of the Cold War, the very embodiment of the espionage profession, should be a Brit. The country was, after all, pretty peripheral in the vanquishing of Communism, and indeed at the height of the Soviet threat was lapsing into a grim Brezhnevite decay of its own. And even the dolly birds were more honored in the breach: if Kim Philby and co are anything to go by, Her Majesty’s Secret Service inclined more toward Plenty O’Toole than Pussy Galore.

And yet, if one were to say the words “secret agent” to almost anyone within range of western popular culture this last half-century, he or she would conjure a suave Englishman (mostly played by Scotsmen, Welshmen, Irishmen and Australians) ordering martinis and shagging his way around the world on behalf of a nation all but shagged out. President Bush implicitly endorsed this curious pre-eminence in his notorious 16 words from the 2003 State of the Union:
The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Well, of course. And how would they learn that? The CIA, with the unlimited resources of the hyperpower, sent in Joseph C Wilson IV to sip mint tea in Niger with retired bureaucrats for a few days: Double-oh-IV, licensed to kill time. London no doubt dispatched Bond to break into the presidential palace and run around the basement laboratory shooting huge numbers of extras in aluminum-foil catsuits, while still finding ten minutes for a vigorous encounter with some appealingly dusky West African totty (007 was always an equal-opportunity sex fiend; long before it was fashionable, he was usually game for a little affirmative action…

Where was I? Oh, yes. Bond, James Bond. Simon Winder’s thesis is that 007 is both a reflection of and an escape from imperial decline: “I want to convey, perhaps in an overdrawn form, some of the ways in which Britain has changed – and by following James Bond show some of a vanished world which he in various ways pulled together.”

Sounds fun, and Winder would seem the ideal chap to do it. A few years back, he compiled a lovely anthology called My Name’s Bond… rounding up Ian Fleming’s best soundbites from the 007 novels. There are an awful lot of them, not least from Casino Royale:

‘A dry Martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet.’
'Oui, monsieur.’
‘Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?’
‘Certainly, monsieur.’ The barman seemed pleased with the idea.

Unlike Bond's critics, who get ever more irked with his rituals. My Name’s Bond… is one of those small perfect books I love to take on long flights. Winder is a Fleming fan and he has an eye for those moments of pure stylistic pleasure the novels offer. It’s in attempting to advance from annotated arcana to an argument that Winder’s new book comes a cropper. He begins in the dark at the dawn of the Roger Moore imperium: “I am ten years old, sitting in a suburban English cinema. On the screen a man with a large chin and black roll-neck sweater pushes through jungle foliage… A white woman has been tied to a post and a black man dressed in animal skins is laughing crazily and wielding a massive poisonous snake… The man with the large chin starts shooting the black people…”

The fan of My Name’s Bond… suddenly seems a lot more sheepish about the whole business. He can’t even get through a list of the movies without collapsing in embarrassment: “The Man With The Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979)… I’m sorry. I just can’t go on it’s all so terrible. They’re roughly the same, come out at irregular intervals and tend to have the word Die in the title.”

Oh, dear. And this is before Mr Winder has even got stuck into his big picture: the violence and racism and ugliness of the British Empire. Though he refers to “a sort of paroxysm of national self-loathing”, he would appear to be the principal evidence of it. And even then you vaguely suspect that he’s faking it. There are, broadly speaking, three reactions to Bond: those who dislike him; those who love him; and those who love him but feel obliged to deplore all the frightful imperialism, racism, alcoholism, chain smoking, snobbery, profoundly unsafe sex, etc.

Winder elects to join this last category, which makes the book a glummer read than it ought to be, a kind of Doctor No But... British audiences have never had any difficulty reconciling 007’s luster with their more general eclipse: The opening of The Spy Who Loved Me, when Bond skis off a cliff and opens his Union Jack parachute, is offered and understood as a kind of semi-parodic flag-waving. In the Roger Moore era, the film-makers took to ending the movie with a scene in which the Queen or Mrs Thatcher or some such would be waiting to congratulate Bond via satellite link only to be confronted by the old legover maestro doing the horizontal mambo with Holly Goodhead as an excuse for a final double-entendre. “What’s Bond doing?” “I think,” explains Q, looking at the radar rather than at Roger, “he’s attempting re-entry, sir.” Or: “Just keeping the British end up, sir.” Or a dozen others, as Roger Moore rogered more.

With the best will in the world, one can’t divine a lot of imperial self-doubt in this oeuvre. And Winder, demonstrating the peculiar snobberies of the minor public schoolboy (if you’ll forgive a touch more snobbery), allows his obsessions to lead him astray – as in his assertion that these tales of Brit derring-do were viewed in America as “comedies of self-delusion”. Oh, really? So it’s not the babes and the gadgets and the car chases? Just the huge market for post-imperial “comedies of self-delusion”. Who knew?

Poor old Winder. A genial gentleman publisher of the patrician left, he seems to have missed the central feature of Bond’s character: his cool. Winder is not cool; he is over-heated to the point of rhetorical meltdown: his nation’s history is “despicable”, “repulsive”, “revolting and mad”, “sickening”, “nauseating”, “nauseating and absurd”… One feels that, instead of this shrill overkill, he might have taken a lesson from Blofeld et al and expressed his loathing with an amused contempt – “I’m afraid you’re beginning to bore me, Mr Bond” – before lowering him into the piranha tank. There are some useful insights here – the observation that Ken Adam’s Bond sets are so good that real location scenes such as the Vegas hotels of Diamonds Are Forever look wan by comparison. But otherwise, generalizing ever more wildly and hysterically, Winder manages to miss all his targets – Fleming, Bond and the British Empire. He seems an amiable self-deprecating cove, but so’s Hugh Grant, and I wouldn’t fancy his chances trying to beat up Daniel Craig.

The Wall Street Journal, November 24th 2006