N

ews editors revel in it; when used as a seeming synonym for refutation, denial is a candidate for our most Orwellian word. As a verb, it undermines modernity’s great achievement of presumed innocence until proven guilt, enabling insinuations before the subject can even get her boots on. As a suffix coining a hyphenated noun, it renders disagreement unreasonable, irrational and even malign, so undermining another great modern achievement — tolerance.

In headlines, the short and solitary verb is usually overshadowed by what follows: the description of the denied act, now indelibly linked with the denier. A recent news.com.au headline reads: “Warren Rodwell’s wife Miraflor Gutang denies being involved in kidnapping”. Yet the story contains nothing to argue that she was a party to the crime, except perhaps the unstated idea that all Filipinos are bandits. Indeed, buried 2/3rds down, a Filipino government official says Gutang was instrumental in securing Rodwell’s release!

In an argument, a denial garners infinitely less respect than a refutation. If I refute a mathematical proof then I demonstrate its fallaciousness, but if I deny it, I’m either stating that the proof never existed, which is absurd, or that I dispute its conclusions without having refuted the proof itself — which is also absurd, or at least, blatantly and even ridiculously dishonest, an exercise in magical thinking. I have left the realm of reason.

Refutation comprises logic whereas denial comprises judgment and power. To reasonably deny something it must be within my domain, and this applies for both senses of the word, refuse and refute. Computers are programmed, at least in fiction, to say “Access Denied”. Denying differs from obstructing, preventing or blocking access in that it is more metaphysical; while these other actions involve physically barring access, denying it is a decision about my right to access; the operating system’s power to enforce that decision is a given. Similarly, a government agency grants or denies a visa, a court one’s visitation rights.

I may plausibly deny actions or knowledge attributed to me (even without refutation, contradiction or an alibi) but I cannot plausibly deny those of others, nor independent things such as ideas. Though we do speak of denying the rights of others, since the domain is now the theoretical. Here it’s understood that I don’t have the power to enforce my denial, but am instead exercising a moral judgment of their right to that right. Perhaps this is within my domain because, like property, rights are possessed through consensus, which includes consent from me.

All this is why an accusation of x-denial is so damaging: it puts me in an absurd, Kafkaesque position. Since I cannot reasonably deny something that is not within my domain, accusing me of doing so renders me unreasonable. And if the thing I’m denying is a consensus that seems salutary, such as climate change and efforts to save life on earth, or Holocaust history and efforts to preserve its victims’ memory and ensure never again, then I am surely perverse, anti-social and/or malign. To be a hyphenated denier is to be a pariah — and in some countries even a criminal (though few have ever been convicted).

As Edward Skidelsky puts it, denial is the secular form of blasphemy. Previous generations of Europeans persecuted Jews for Christ-denial — how antagonistic, such refusal to accept the good news. Why spoil this liberating, universalising, true and good movement by refusing to join it? Wikipedia currently defines denialism as “choosing to deny reality as a way to avoid an uncomfortable truth.” We’d do ourselves a favor if instead we defined it as trafficking in accusations of such.

I

confess, after a class at Bikram in the Lanes, I just don’t enjoy being a mule and stopping at Tesco Express on Jubilee St for a pair of 5l mineral waters to carry home in my bike panniers. I’ve tried to enjoy it, thinking that schlepping water — Irit did it too using the bottom of the pram — serves to keep us to some human roots. But that’s Neanderthal. Surely we always strive to make our water carrying as easy as possible, notwithstanding a story I read lately (sorry, URL escapes me) about a village where after a year of piped water the elders decided to return to the way of walking a mile to the river, as it turned out the walk was the village’s social hub and without it had come strife; there are, so we like to think, by definition, always exceptions in human affairs.

Instead I tried ordering from Tesco Online. We used to do so from Sainsbury’s but stopped because of Irit’s frustration with substitutions and produce short of shelf life. We slightly prefer Tesco’s water anyway, and Sainsbury’s limits you to six 5l bottles. On Tesco’s site I kept adding bottles and got to ten before halting with the online shopper’s equivalent of awe. Is there even a limit? There are other staples we like from Tesco’s as well, such as their Normandy butter and stringy rather than mushy frozen spinach, and frequent half-price deals on Ben & Jerry’s (more frequent than Sainsbury’s? Probably slightly). The minimum payment for delivery is £3.50. At 10 bottles (storing more than that starts to become awkward or will require some thinking), this mishlocha la-mishpocha (“family delivery”) is costing me 70p for each easier bike ride home, with the bonus of all that other stuff delivered too. Mildly worthwhile and guilt-inducing both.

We did buy a Brita filter jug but there seem to be no numbers for how much chlorine it actually does filter. And I’m not pooh-poohing tap water per se — in both Glasgow and Amsterdam I remember it was lovely — but here in Brighton I just don’t find it so. And it seems to me that for the small amount of extra money in the monthly spending scheme of things, it’s worth drinking what you consider the best water easily available.

In an age where cancer is so prevalent, and in a household where a dog lost a limb to it, I’m wary of man-made things, and tap water is one of them. The sole water carrier isn’t about to go out of business if anyone gets ill. Maybe that’s paranoid but, after breathing, drinking is the most basic thing we do and if I have the energy to be overly prudent about one thing, let it be that.

Ben & Jerry’s: I now prefer Phish Food to Cookie Dough. I think this portends that I am on the way out.

I

t’s taken three weeks of owning the device to transfer my phone number from my five-year-old Nokia N95 8GB to the iPhone 4s. Aside from minutes and data remaining on the contract, I was accustomed to the N95, even if I’d felt more affection for its predecessor the jolly Nokia 6630, and hesitated to say goodbye.

Why I Held Off

The iPhone is so engaging I’ve worried I’ll be fiddling with it whilst out and about, undesirable because back at my desk I already spend so much time facing a screen.

Turns out however that it’s so engaging I actually prefer it for some tasks — such as quick email checks — to the MacBook Pro, for which I need a desk or a countertop; and to my first-generation iPad, which in comparison can feel slow and the browser can stutter. So I’m using these other screens less often.

Whether total screen time is reduced I’m not sure, but it’s more varied, so it feels like less. Or at any rate, if it is more then I’ve succumbed to it gratefully.

Initial WTFs

Initially though the iPhone did present some unpleasant surprises. How to insert the SIM? I hadn’t noticed the little tool provided in the box. The home screen doesn’t rotate when the phone does — encountering this I thought the gyroscope might be broken. The phone’s exquisitely handsome looks are marred on the back by small print and regulatory logos, which is a pity — the N95 doesn’t have all this crap. Plus its edges initially felt a little sharp in the hand, though no longer. In the Mail app, only one signature can be set for multiple email accounts, a clear case of erring too far in dumbing down (I’m trying Sparrow instead). On the N95, the app I used most turned out to be the amazing Google Maps. Picking up both phones and firing it up, the buttons on the N95 enable me to use it with one hand, whereas I definitely need two to competently pinch to zoom on the iPhone.

The iPhone’s iOS has no interest in hunting down the strongest wifi signal it can access. This is particularly annoying when walking from room to room using Skype. Going to Settings to change network is tedious, as is adjusting other settings such as Brightness or switching on Bluetooth that’s been off to conserve battery. (Shouldn’t Bluetooth switch itself off after a period of non-use? Knowing iOS, maybe it does. How to find out?) To seek the strongest wifi signal I’ve taken to quickly switching Airplane Mode on and off — it’s the easiest switch to get to in Settings, as it’s the first and the only one without a submenu. Accessing settings was easier with the N95 thanks to Jbak Taskman and desktop icons that go beyond apps. Improving access to settings is alone sufficient reason to jailbreak the iPhone (until I got the phone I’d never even heard the word Cydia and its secondary iOS market) which in itself is upsetting as this is after all a usability issue, which Apple surely cares about.

I have a song for each person who calls me. Transferring these over, I realized I couldn’t: the iPhone uses a special ringtone format. Goodness, why not allow any audio format that the phone can play, just as the N95’s Symbian system does? I suppose having to convert a song into the iPhone ringtone format — and GarageBand does this easily — forces you to be more picky about when the sound starts and ends, but this choice by Apple is worrying. You have this Unix-based phone that brings users the web so magnificently, and you’re selling ringtones?

For the more principled among us this closedness is a reason to avoid iOS devices entirely — Cory Doctorow said it in his famous essay Why I won’t buy an iPad. But the jailbreaking community does help address this concern. I’d like to think that even if I personally don’t end up jailbreaking my iPhone, I would hesitate to own it if I knew nobody else was doing so. Okay, this is not true; the fact is, Apple had me with the Retina screen. I justify my seduction by viewing the web itself as our giant open platform, that ways of accessing it will come and go, and that currently this is the best.

Though I do think it’s important that we remain literate in the Unix command line, and considering Apple’s interest in education, I’m surprised the phone doesn’t include a command line app — perhaps it will eventually. Meanwhile my work as a web developer justifies buying Prompt.

Annoyances Compensated

Pretty soon these annoyances were more than offset by the aforementioned screen, by the glassy low-friction symmetry of the phone’s surfaces, by the camera, and by the third-party ecosystem for both software and hardware. Google Maps looks so fabulous on the iPhone that I don’t mind using two hands for it. Which is what I knew would happen, and is one of the reasons I’d put off getting a touchscreen-only phone until succumbing to the Retina screen.

What a spectacularly audacious leap, making the back feel identical to the front, so that the device is a completely regular shape, a rounded mini monolith. Low-friction glass is arguably terribly impractical and would surely have been vetoed anywhere else but Apple — the thing will slide off a surface that pretty much any other device will stay on. Then crack. Ah, but it is so lovely and sleek in the hand. I was concerned that the iPhone seemed designed less for the hand than for the eye — the lack of buttons, for instance — but it actually gives the hand, at least while switched off, significantly more graceful pleasure than does the N95. With one button-press on the top the phone is instantly off (the thing is so fast and responsive), and you can rub it and juggle it and generally do pleasant little hand gymnastics with it like it’s a playing card. Yes, it lacks sliders with which to fiddle, but that’s what makes the fiddling more elegant. Yes, it’s heavy, but that weight already feels normal to me now, pleasantly substantial, so that picking up the N95 I’m shocked by its lightness — it just feels like nothing. As the Mac brought computers within the humanist tradition by introducing proportional typefaces, so the design and materials of the iPhone bring mobile phones into the fold of other civilizing little accessories like a nice razor, lighter or pen. I love how its low-friction surfaces let it slip so easily in and out of pockets, like silk; those are moments when it especially feels a classy, elevating accessory.

The iPhone 4S’s display is so amazing it makes photos appear more spectacularly than I can remember otherwise, save for looking at an illuminated slide through a viewer. With all my digital photos effortlessly synched onto the iPhone, it isn’t only a mini-monolith, it’s a mini-monolith of me, like I can almost climb inside my past. As life goes by and you don’t see various loved ones because they’re far away or no longer, the vivid representations within the phone of both those present and those not can seem to equalize them, so that perhaps for older people an iPhone loaded up with photos categorized by face is even more emotionally compelling. Though it does help to be short-sighted rather than long, as most older people are, so that you can hold it close to your eyes, still unable to distinguish pixels that until the Retina era would break the backlit illusion.

I now notice how creaky the N95 is; the pressure of pressing the buttons makes the whole plasticky thing groan. While it too is a little wonder — I’ve dropped it on hard surfaces a number of times, whereupon the battery case flies off and the battery falls out, but with no permanent damage — in contrast to the pared-back elemental shapes of the mini-monolith it now looks and feels weirdly idiosyncratic. The plastic buttons have evolved to a most peculiar shape, garishly color-coded and marked with obscure Nokia system-specific icons, whereas the iPhone has brushed metal steel buttons that are either circles or rounded rectangles, their only icons the universally understood “+” and “-”. More than any other Apple device, the side view of the iPhone illustrates Apple’s debt to the audacious beauty and simplicity of Dieter Rams’s Braun devices. Antenna-gate, the problem in the previous iPhone where holding it could reduce signal strength, reminds me of the Frank Lloyd Wright story of his favored client Johnson calling him up to complain that the beautiful ceiling leaks. Move your chair, Wright admonished. Hold it differently, Apple suggested. But of course these arrogant retorts hid utter mortification and the error would be corrected.

Actually, because of its lovely slab shape I feel strange putting it up to my ear and speaking into it like a phone. With the relegation of Phone functionality to being just another app like any other, the iPhone feels less a pocket phone with amazing computer-like functionality than a pocket computer which can, among other methods, communicate with people using telephony networks. For me at least this change in emphasis suits.

More Peeves & Pleasures

With use I did however acquire more peeves. Whereas I miss T9 for text entry less than I thought — after all, I made plenty of frustrating errors there too — I miss Speed Dial with physical buttons more than I thought. In order to call someone, I’d rather hold down a physical key on a number pad for three seconds than (avoiding Siri, which is usually even more annoying) fire up the Phone app (possibly after escaping whatever app I left the phone in), touch Favorites, then scroll down an indistinguishable text list rather than say a grid of thumbnails of faces. Well, thumbnails in Phone.app’s Favorites will probably come. Once nice thing is that with photos synched and categorized by face in iPhoto, my favorite photo of someone can appear fullscreen when we speak.

I finally started using Folders; whereas on the iPad 1 all the folders look the same, on the iPhone I can actually see all the little icons within each folder, so can distinguish among folders without having to read their labels. Voice recognition works surprisingly well and is impressive, even though sometimes it’s a relief to return to the keyboard, even the iPhone keyboard, because with voice recognition correcting an error is harder than writing it out in the first place. Which brings me to my least favorite aspect of iOS: the elimination of arrow keys. This is sadistic, borderline criminally so. And how disturbing that with all its cash Apple won’t make a deal with Swype in order to improve the keyboard.

When I first got the phone I hunted the webs for apps to download, and the type I downloaded most were related to the camera. Most of these were a waste. The camera apps are confusing with nasty graphics and ultimately seem to only offer one function beyond the built-in Camera app: separating the focus and the light metering touchscreen functionality, which I can live without; I can’t understand all the praise for Camera+. The only camera app that was worth buying was Pano; very nice. In contrast the photo editing software seems more worthwhile. ColorSplash does what it sets out to do very nicely. Halftone is a good fun app that I’ve actually used a few times. For everything else iPhoto seems superior.

I think having date-based Reminders separate from Calendar is a bad idea. Sure, there can be two apps, but they should share data; Reminders should be just another way to get things into your Calendar. I do like Photostream, that I need do nothing to get photos from the phone’s camera onto my laptop to archive and edit, and iPad to view (and if I had a newer model, maybe edit here instead). Having such impressive apps such as GarageBand, iPhoto, dJay and Halftone on such a small device is mindblowing. I mentioned I bought Prompt by Panic, whose Transmit app is still a central part of my workflow. I trusted them to do something nice, but still, it’s painful to pay for such a fundamental computing thing as a terminal application.

The Camera

One reason as significant as any that I got the iPhone is to be walking around with a better camera, as nowadays it’s invariably the only one I carry, and always carrying a camera is an ambition I’ve always harboured on and off since high school. The N95’s camera seemed great for a phone, was a great improvement over the Nokia 6630, which also amazed me at the time, but this is so much better still. It’s quick on the draw, and also in switching back and forth between the camera and the recent photos — important for checking whether the shot is good enough or to try again. And holding it as a camera is simply nicer because it’s metal.

Being able to do 1020px video is just phenomenal. I bought a tripod adaptor case from kungl.com (also seriously considered the Glif and may try that as well), and also got my first GorillaPod tripod, which not only stands on a surface but wraps around most anything. I knew there would be tripod adaptors because there’s such a rich accessories market for the thing — blood pressure monitors, etc. The iPhone’s flourishing ecosystem is a vital reason to choose it, and ultimately probably the only reason, or at least the best measure of all the others.

Reading

People write about watching movies on the iPad in bed, lying on their backs, the iPad on their chest. Even with the lower resolution on the iPad I have, it’s still better for watching video than the iPhone just because it’s bigger.

But for reading in bed, I greatly prefer the iPhone, because I can lie on my side and put it next to my head on the pillow. It’s so small, I don’t have to move my eyes much to take in the entire screen. For reading in the dark, set the triple-click home button to reversing colors.

Since I’m short-sighted, and because the device is so small and dense I can bring it so close, I can remove my glasses to use it and see it even better, which is liberating. It’s at such moments, being able to read comfortably in bed in an unpixellated serif font with the lights out, I might remember how insanely great the iPhone is.

Battery

For all the pros and cons, we must end on the fundamental issue of battery life, for without it, all else is moot. For years on the N95 I’d used a third-party double-capacity battery, which was thicker and required a case that stuck out the back of the phone. I didn’t care. Battery life is paramount. I also carried two spare batteries in my wallet.

With the sealed-in battery of the iPhone the whole setup is more fragile. I bought a case with a battery and another external battery that connects with a USB cable. These solutions are clunkier than little spare batteries, but provided they do the job, I guess I can accept it. It does however seems a basic flaw to be unable to swap out batteries. Maybe the glass back of future iPhones will be solar panels.

I’d be perfectly glad if Apple held off doing anything more with the phone except reducing the size of its internal components to allow for a bigger battery, and continue working on improving the battery itself. And for the phone to charge itself a little with solar panels. (Might better battery life cannibalize iPad sales?) Everything else seems pretty much perfect already: The human eye can probably no longer detect any improvement to the screen; the thing feels more responsive for many tasks than my MacBook Pro; the form factor is exquisite. Oh, it would be nice if the “+” camera button could be two-stage like a camera, and the Home button an accelerating little thumbpad so that I can, when the need arises, and it does, revert to one-handed use.

Jonathan Bildad 2013 for adamkhan.net

E

ach of our opening shots is a stunning landscape, more sky than earth in keeping with Eastern sophistication. Our first signs of life are subtle: sounds of insects and birds. Then we do have a sight, but it’s death, the skull of a fellow beast of some kind. (Or was our second sign of life actually alphabet — the words “THE DAWN OF MAN”.) Next, a recognizably human skeleton alongside the skull, unburied. Our man, or at least our apelike and hairy precursor, is a resigned vegetarian, living in groups among other herbivores, passively ignoring them until one of the four-legged fellows gets too close, then, irritated, he makes a display of aggression: I’m telling you, step away from the bush! Or, or, I’ll tell you to step away from the bush again!

Within moments it’s the richest, most intelligent depiction of prehistoric man I’ve ever seen or read. The uncredited and unknown people in the ape-suits must be dancers; how they move is an incredibly energetic output for us. Contrast their physical reactions when witnessing the monolith to those of the astronauts in the newly-minted 21st century, even while the song remains the same: the men in the space suits are practically motionless, whereas the men in the ape suits go apeshit; you wonder if the term wasn’t coined on this movie set. The crazed gesticulations are perfectly convincing, the repeated jolting back from touching the monolith a modern choreography.

I’m jumping ahead to the spaceship docking in orbit — isn’t that the done thing? Here is a very differently modern choreography, as engineered, precise, arid and graceful as the previous was frenetic, shabby, fearful and explosive. Somehow we feel the director’s presence as narrator; apparently there was originally going to be a voiceover, though surely that would have diminished the operatic grandeur of synchronized orbit.

2001: A Space Odyssey was big in the culture; people lined up and saw it multiple times, apparently a first. It was Star Wars until with the Spirit of ’77 the characters of that adventure overwhelmed our reverence for the stateliness of this one. A year more astounding than 1977, 1968 seems long ago; as I write we’re passed 2010, the year of even the sequel. Both Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke are gone. I mentioned to my Dad that I’d watched this film. He was struck for a moment: Yes, I’ve seen it many times, he said. I don’t remember him saying that about any other.

The moment, the mysteriousness of creativity, is depicted so artfully. No speech, obviously; no living alien to impart the knowledge, at least, not a recognizable one. We bear witness to the creature bearing witness to the object. He’s seen a straight line before, every day along the horizon, on the surface of the water, but nowhere else. Neither the shape nor the color of the monolith is like anything in his natural surroundings, yet it’s so obvious to him, so appealing, so kindred. Unlike the four-leggeds around him, he was ready to be influenced by the awesome implications of this object — indeed, the eclipse informs us that he was only ready at this precise moment. And it’s the eclipse that seems to be what finally moves him. The novelty of the monolith has passed; he’s scrubbing for grubs near it. He looks up and sees even more symmetry behind the monolith: the sun and the moon are lined up behind it! Mindblowing, if you’re able to reflect on such things, and at last he is. There has to be a moment, doesn’t there? Stories seem to be inevitably about that moment — Aristotle’s reversals and recognitions — and this film is going for the grandest ones in human history. Or at least, using this early one to buttress the grandeur of the one to follow.

Nothing — not toolmaking, not even fire — was as big as this discovery, Kubrick tells us, taking up Nietszche’s challenge that we investigate the long dawn of man then affronting our sensibilities just as Nietszche loved to do: what the creature now suddenly has is a way to kill these others alongside which he has lived so peaceably. Together with the terrible grandeur here is some comedy, it seems to me. It’s comical how these funny-looking four-legged creatures, sharing his patch, were so irritating to him; it must have felt extremely undignifying to be lumped together, prey for leopards, with them, so much so that you felt like murdering them. And indeed we cut to the weaponized apes feasting on the raw meat of one of these creatures, while its fellows carry on foraging nearby as if oblivious. And here’s the black comedy: they’re not quite as oblivious as they seem; suddenly they’re keeping a respectful distance. This is probably one of the most chilling scenes in movies. There is a certain relationship we two-leggeds have to the four-legged. Man is evil from his youth.

The eclipses: what an exemplary cinematic method of communicating a philosophical idea. The first monolith was placed the night before the eclipse and was bound to be discovered the following day. But the second monolith has been buried underground — on the far side of the moon even — yet is viewed by Dr Floyd just as an eclipse occurs; whoever planted it prefigured the precise moment when it would be discovered by the human agent who could act upon it. In this graphic wordless way the film illustrates our great conundrum between free will and determinism. Like the astonishing beauty of the planet in Avatar being a riff on Earth, the fact that these interventions don’t happen in reality serve to render life as we know it even more amazing, in that, as Douglas Adams might put it, we invented the digital watch all by ourselves.

The man-apes are omnivorous although they apparently haven’t been getting much meat. At the risk of heresy, it appears when witnessing such a breakthrough that species have evolutionary energy directed somewhere. Each change in the body cascades to and coincides with others. Operating the thumb, for example, requires more brain, more brain requires I suppose more meat or deeper sleep — things like that: mini teleologies. Perhaps I love Darwin more for the down-to-earth believability of the story and his enfranchising us with our fellow creatures rather than the sharpness of the logic. Or perhaps I need to properly read Origin of the Species. Ah, how a detailed convincing story can inspire us to grapple with issues.

The credits are so classically Hollywood it seems old-fashioned. Given the music, it never could have been any other way, but Kubrick has a lot to live up to when he splashes his and the film’s names on those quintessentially towering notes in Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. The stilted symmetry he may be mocking later he does not eschew for the intro to his own work. And before the credits there is the empty black screen that looks like the monolith itself, the rich interesting music making clear the program has begun, the movie claiming to be able to provide what its homologue within does also. Ah, the ambitions of the 60s. Then after that cold formalism he gives us the great warm landscape compositions before we arrive at the apes. I love how the intermission comes with the scene of HAL lip-reading — “OK, you can talk now” — and has its own music and timing built into the film. I’ve missed this intermezzo in movies, bestowing grandeur, making it more theatre-like. When I saw 2001 as a kid at Aaron’s house on VHS I was pretty bored, disappointed and baffled by the parts in Infinity. Now they seemed shorter and more straightforward, a brief climax really containing the coda of the very lovely screensaver shots.

The scenes with Dr. Heywood R. Floyd arriving at the space station and speaking at the conference: are they glamorizing or satirizing our modern social ways? It looks and feels a bit like Mad Men but is that because it’s commenting on its time or merely because it’s a product of it? Floyd has four interactions. With the hostess, he fusses with his suitcase while she looks away until it’s time for him to leave the giant elevator (how visually glorious are the two-dimensional moving patterns on our screen that are the door’s squares as it rotates in three dimensions within the story); it’s polite and distant. He calls home to his child, a conversation that just about passes muster as humane. He has a seemingly social conversation with the Russians. He gives a talk to his colleagues, going through the charade of taking questions despite having no intention of stating any more than he already has. This seems to run the gamut of human interaction for 21st century man. Then it’s over, nothing has happened to these characters except Floyd witnessing the monolith — they’re all gone in the movie’s past. Like an historic novel by James Michener, man’s journey is our subject here, not one particular hero, and the ebb and flow of our coming and passing is more central to the tale than any particular one of us.

Ultimately the film seems with the StarChild to lead to messianism, a conclusion I don’t much like. Maybe when you introduce something like the monolith you stiffen things philosophically — adding actual alien monoliths to human history is like adding midichlorians to the Force — so you end unavoidably with a stiffened conclusion. So that’s probably why we decided we prefer the Force, and Han Solo and Princess Leia, R2D2 and C-3P0. Nonetheless, the shots and the aesthetics, the designs of the spaceships, the hostesses’ egg-shaped hats, the way of depicting zero gravity: nobody has done it so delightfully, and those who’ve tried since took obvious cues from it. The story may be linear and dry, but the way it’s told is juicy and luminous.

S

ome 22 months ago your companion last opined here that “the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.” Moreover I put this as the blurb, so it’s been a statement as clear as I can muster on my personal homepage over this well-nigh half a presidential term. And I feel embarrassed of the stridency.

I’d heard a lot of the nastiness leading to Barack Obama becoming President. The scandalously absent senatorial stint. The candidate from an earlier office who strangely dropped out of a race against him. Being in the pews for the spews of Reverend Wright. All that. And back in March 2010 there had so far only been diplomatic mishaps — the return of the Churchill bust, the iPod gift to the Queen, the bowing to foreign rulers — all of which suggested this was an Administration that could well be disdainful of entrenched allies and by extension its own polity.

The feeling began to change with the killing of the pirates. Then the Bin Laden assassination: after this it was no longer tenable to hold the previous opinion of possible perfidy. One issue finally turned me. It’s probably a silly one, as, in my lack of a real grasp of goings-on, I grabbed onto it as emblematic, and when I do that I invariably turn out to have misjudged. But still I stand by it. Among the first astounding 800-word excerpts I posted at Latmag, was Public Library One: Benjamin Franklin’s account in his autobiography of learning to get things done in Philadelphia by putting himself as much as he could out of sight. When Obama said he was leading from behind in the NATO action to remove Qadaffi in Libya, the right did not acknowledge the wisdom of this approach, but instead jumped on it as yet another example of at best witlessness, at worst, treason. Eventually some conservatives praised the Libya action but first the praise was timid then it was quiet. My confidence in the Right was shaken.

They should have understood — because they themselves were persuaded — that killing Bin-Laden was a game-changer, that Obama could no longer be attacked on these grounds. Getting Qadaffi out with no loss of American life; enabling a resounding European military success — these are significant achievements. Attacks on foreign policy started sounding like groupthink, rendering the general point-of-view less astute and moral than fixed and relentless, which may be appropriate for the parties themselves in campaign mode, but not for the media, even the partisan media. And since I presume to be Dr Bellweather Everyman, it seems that the Right’s failure to properly acknowledge these undeniable successes upset their credibility among many and made Obama’s reelection more likely than not.

Indeed, although the first year of foreign policy seemed to have been squandered on petty and debilitating resets and errors, the ship of state now seems to be more or less sailing in the same direction that George W Bush set; we’ve heard consistently, for example, that despite political tensions, military-to-military cooperation between the US and Israel is deeper than ever before. This enhances credibility and trust in many quarters, such as mine. Walter Russell Mead’s account of the recent diplomatic blitzkrieg in Asia suggests that the Administration is at least on the case and may actually even be on the ball.

If the Right is more honest about Obama’s newfound success abroad they might have a better chance against him, as American presidents are apparently generally elected anyway on how things are at home, not abroad. And this Administration has not found a way to overcome the creeping paralysis of the United States’ political process. I have another emblematic measure in this realm, and it is: I’ll know America’s fixed when they let me in. American institutions spent money on my education for years; most of my clients are based in the US and they transfer money out of the country to pay me. So I don’t think I’m being overly prideful in saying that all in all the USA should prefer me in rather than out. And yet, there’s no clear, simple, straightforward immigration passage for me. It’s an outrage that in this nation of immigrants, Ellis Island is a museum. I did believe, and wrote here, that if McCain won, he would have fixed immigration. And immigration is in turn emblematic of all the other things that seem to elude fixing. Currently, the American system does not seem to be midwiving the expected divinely efficacious results.

Jonathan Bildad 2013 for adamkhan.net

A

ll beautiful things belong to the same age,” wrote Oscar Wilde. Writing in Wired, Dave Winer compares the co-founder of Apple with an American before him who also set a jewel in the nation’s crown, New York’s 5th Avenue.

Form does not merely follow function, Wright insisted; rather, form and function are one. Jobs restated the same truth: design is not how something looks and feels, but how it works. Wright wrote in The Natural House that “the single secret of simplicity” is “that we may truly regard nothing at all as simple in itself,” rather it “must achieve simplicity… as a perfectly realized part of some organic whole.” Hello, iOS devices. When unveiling the iPad, Jobs spoke of Apple being at the crossroads of Technology and the Liberal Arts; similarly, Wright said that beautiful buildings are “works of art using the best technology.” Function from form, simplicity from complexity, art from technology: these two men shipped these new values.

Both preached the American way of not dwelling on the past. FLLW removed the rear window of his Lincoln Continental supposedly so as to be unable to look behind him; SJ reportedly removed the Apple II on display in the company cafeteria for the same reason. When young both men were foppish and good-looking (though Jobs did have his unwashed hippie stage). As they got older each zeroed in on a particular look and stuck with it — Jobs the black turtleneck, jeans and sneakers; Wright the tweed suits, cane and porkpie hat. They were photographed more often as older men; the camera liked who they became.

They were renowned for their attention to the smallest detail and relying on their own taste rather than their customers’. Jobs said that under his direction Apple does no market research as it’s not the consumer’s job to know what he wants. Wright wrote that it pained him when clients brought their own furniture into his houses. In fact he said it in a lecture to Disney employees: “The public doesn’t know what it wants. If the public is paying your bills, it’s entitled to have you stand up to the thing you do because you alone know.”

In both industries — computers and buildings — it was and remains unique to control the entire product, yet Wright and Jobs insisted on it. Wright designed everything himself, from the supporting walls to the patterns on the rugs. Apple is the only computer company that designs both the hardware and the software — and now with iOS, even down to the CPUs.

They had dropped out of college during their first years to enjoy huge early success in their fields, then undergo spectacular setbacks and even more spectacular comebacks — though Wright had a lifetime long enough for a number of these. Jobs we lost at the age of 56 — after Apple II, Macintosh, Pixar, iTunes, iMac, the iPhone, MacBook Air and iPad. When Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, and he too had arrived at the apex of his second comeback with the completion of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and its famous survival of a terrible earthquake. Wright’s greatest accomplishments — Fallingwater, Usonia — were a comeback or two in the future. What might have been Steve’s 17-year opus Guggenheim Museum, completed 2047?

They were adamant freethinkers. Jobs’s philosophic underpinning was the 1960s counterculture, Wright’s Unitarianism and the earlier counterculture of Emersonian transcendentalism. They took civilizational pilgrimages, Wright to Japan, Jobs to India. Jobs said at the 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, “Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” Wright said that the problem for young Americans is an “over-gregarious life”, insisting that the architect at least go to nature, that is, observe the reality of things as opposed to others’ words about the reality of things.

Nonetheless, ignoring others’ opinions is not the same as ignoring their needs. As Jobs friend Larry Brilliant writes, “The defining character of Steve Jobs isn’t his genius, it isn’t his talent, it isn’t his success. It’s his love… He communicated that love through bits of steel and plastic.” I believe Wright was the same way through steel, brick, wood and glass — they were able to imagine themselves as the client or customer before returning to the conference room or drafting easel to give ’em something beyond they knew they wanted.

Perhaps it was these somehow intertwined talents — thinking for yourself and empathizing with others — that made them such master salesmen. People joked about the Jobs reality distortion field; about Wright, Herbert Johnson wrote of the beloved Johnson Administration Building: “At first Frank Lloyd Wright was working for me. Then we were working together… Finally, I was working for him.”

But the love was precisely, even ruthlessly channeled; neither spoke with their biological fathers, and both abandoned their first children as their fathers did them. There was very much Bad Steve and Bad Wright. Both it’s said could be phenomenally ruthless, rude, vindictive, even dishonest. One client warned another that Wright is a dangerous man.

Both men enjoyed well-made objects such as fine cars, which don’t come free. That Jobs became staggeringly wealthy at an age when the rest of us are still in school, whereas Wright struggled throughout his life to pay his bills (and often apparently didn’t) was at least partially due to their being in different businesses: a computer, once completed, is mass-produced on an assembly line and if successful sells by the million. But you can only shake out of your sleeve a single building at a time if it must grow from its location and the client’s particular needs. That said, it’s easy to imagine that Jobs, if he had been a turn-of-the-century architect with a vision for better houses for middle-income Americans, would have created the managerial and logistical infrastructure to actually pull it off. While Wright’s work necessitated supplementing his income by dealing in Japanese art, Jobs’ made him the business titan of his age: during a time of economic malaise, Apple’s innovativeness under his lead provided the entire nation with hope, serving as the closest thing to a contemporary Apollo program.

At root, both men improved the world for everyone by humanizing — that is, aesthetizing and perfecting — objects central to modern life; images of their creations belong on any future Voyager Golden Records. For Wright it was the home, his “broad shelter in the open”; for Jobs, the computer, his “bicycle for the mind”. Mediocrity still dominates both industries, as perhaps it must, but these men always led to something better. While the white spiral of the Guggenheim Museum has been criticized for achieving its striking effect by dint of the more stolid and conforming graceful buildings that surround it, and the same could be said for the transparency of the Apple Store’s cube, both the museum and the shop would do just fine and probably better in an open field.

As the world has America, America has people such as Steve Jobs. With his recent passing, here’s to the great man finding — Wright’s words, different context — “new sense of repose in quiet streamline effects”.

I

srael is spooked. We all are. With one Presidential election, the rug, while not quite swept from under our feet, looks nonetheless more like a rug and less like a fitted carpet. I’m embarrassed for Israel, for Ambassador Michael Oren fawning over the US-Israel relationship on Charlie Rose, for Prime Minister Netanyahu scurrying to Washington to have to mend relations at the highest level. Will Israel ever trust the United States in quite the same way it has throughout its existence? To be sure, American support for Israel goes deeper than whoever occupies the White House, but the US is a democracy, and unlike James Baker III the sitting President underwent the vetting process of a national election; in some alchemic way he does represents the people. With his 20-year membership in Jeremiah Wright’s church, the American electorate knew what he is ultimately about — socialism and third-world liberation theology — and voted for him anyway because he has physical pizzazz, an ethnicity whose time had finally come, and a political killer instinct. Unfortunately that instinct, while necessary, is merely the enabler of the man’s other attributes, such as ideology, and if these are misguided, it merely makes him more effectively destructive.

I say this to a backdrop of the President’s huge victory in getting his party’s healthcare legislation passed. It’s unfortunate — that’s the word that keeps coming to mind — that Israel is facing this gust of wrath just at the high point of this presidency, an historic legislative victory coming after a well-nigh constant decline in support and respect. I’d hoped that after this victory Israeli officials might have been the beneficiaries of some magnanimity. Instead, Israel awakens to a harsher dawn, where the USA is no longer something supra-historical, an almost mythically wonderful agent in the world, the giant bigger brother who will stand by you and even absorb some pathetic blows for you from weak bullies. When you are the junior partner, moves that may seem trivial to the senior partner have a much deeper effect on you. According to the media (peppering its accounts with the term “defiant” and, albeit less frequently, “hardline”), the American Administration lacks trust in Israel’s leadership. In reality, the reverse is what’s happening.

It’s amazing that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this President given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere. That notorious Jerusalem Post poll which put Israeli support for Obama at something ridiculously low, something like 6% — could it have been anywhere close to accurate? Remarkable. Israel has plenty of socially ambitious left-leaners — why did they also not succumb to Hope, change and yes we can? Israelis are quite capable of swooning — I remember the swoon for Amnon Lipkin-Shahak that came and went. What did Israelis alone see in Obama that they feared? What had they read? It’s impressive.

Funky Jerusalem
Friday, September 17th, 2004; Jerusalem, Israel

This Administration’s behavior of being harder to allies than enemies — it’s almost admirable and certainly interesting if it’s actually being pursued deliberately, a secret new foreign policy doctrine. And sadly there does seem to be some short-term benefit to it. Perhaps the Obama braintrust saw the allies’ relationships as just a little too flaccid, the junior partners tending to get away with wagging the dog, and decided that the US could more effectively pursue its interests — and even ultimately those of its allies’ — by maintaining a little more distance from them. It’s like professionalizing the relationship, as if things got a little too friendly for maximal productivity. To put an even more hopeful gloss on things, perhaps this Administration is deliberately reshaping what we call the Free World in order to adapt to facing off not against emotional Russia but Machiavellian China; ever adaptable, the democracies must morph into something that the rival culture understands in order to most effectively tamp it down so that it eventually joins us. [Update: Robert Kagan offers an explanation of this new approach]

But these interpretation of events are merely fanciful; more likely, the policy is a cynical one of abusiveness — I can afford to kick around a bit those who love me, since they aren’t going anywhere. It is however a policy not in keeping with America’s national character. Despite or even because of their outsized stature, Americans genuinely want genuine friends, and treasure reciprocal respect and affection. Being nicer to your friends than to your enemies may seem, if you’re an overly calculating mind, less productive than keeping your friends on edge, but it succeeds in the longer term, else anyone with any self-respect eventually tires of the gymnastics and humiliations required to be your friend. Americans know this instinctively, which is why I think this brouhaha will backfire more on Obama than Israel. Americans are also, I believe, acutely sensitive to the expression of anti-Semitism in their leaders as a sign of dangerous character flaws (anger, delusional thinking, cowardice, thuggery). This fit of pique against Israel could join the larger issue of disregarding ruinous debt and deficit in leading the incumbent and his party to momentous defeat in upcoming elections.

1 Jean Jeures St
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004; Jean Jeures St, Tel Aviv, Israel

And, of course, what easier target than Israel; if the US can go after Israel, that’s a free ride for others to follow as well, and the Europeans need little encouragement. Britain took this opportunity to give Israel an unfettered kick for apparently abusing its passports, expelling a diplomat. Indeed, it looks like the Administration’s previous insults to Britain — such as the return of the Churchill bust — had no ill effect, and America’s junior partners (and all its partners are junior partners) will trample each other for a smile from the leader of the pack. It is better to be feared than loved, Machiavelli argued, talking about the ruler and his subjects. Does the maxim also apply among nations? If it does, and this new poise shows any inkling of having any success, and it sticks, then Obama will have left us a world that is less replete with glorious and inspiring friendship, and one more nasty, brutish and quite likely short.

W

hat do people use to get the job done, they ask over at usesthis.com. I’m going to answer here.

Next time. First, some history. Back in 1996, during my year living in New York, I bought my gorgeous Macintosh PowerBook — even second-hand it still cost a cool round $2,000. One night I left it in my backpack in my car, which I left parked overnight somewhere after a party where I got drunk and/or stoned and crashed at someone’s place. The backpack had been in the front passenger seat, and when I got back to the car in the heat of the next morning the window was smashed and the backpack gone. A lot of ambitious writing ideas were on that PowerBook as well, not backed up. The loss of that computer was deeply demoralizing — I grieved for it and the data.

Running low on funds, and loathe to spend so much again, I replaced it with a much cheaper PowerPC which I brought back with me when I retreated back to Israel in 1996 (whenceupon for some reason I decorated the front of it with the sticker out of the top of my Barmah hat).

But the PowerPC was seriously underpowered and not too well supported in Israel, and I was now spending hours and hours working on web sites, and though I loved the tartan background screen I’d set up, its slowness was driving me nuts. I went over to Windows for the first time, buying an up-to-date no-brand tower desktop that was much faster. In fact I was kind of excited to be away from Apple, it sort of felt like a fast fresh start. After a few years I replaced this no-brand Windows tower desktop workhorse for another newer faster one.

I also spent about $1000 on a large Philips CRT monitor that I was proud of but never really loved. Then around 1999 or so I paid £800 for a second-hand purple Sony Vaio PCG-505 that I thought was really sexy and would enable me to, amazingly enough, work from cafes. When I left Israel in 2004 I gave my tower desktop to Juan Carlos — I think I’d also given him the previous one.

When I got hired at Deepend.it in Rome in early 2005 I was the only Windows user in the office. The secretary had a new iMac and the others used PowerBook G4’s which they brought to work from home every day. I thought this was crazy and inefficient, plus their screens were relatively small compared to the dual-screen desktop they’d set me up with on my Windows tower.

I continued to prefer Windows but I was beginning to waver. My main criterion was this: a window on the Mac can only be resized by dragging the lower-right-hand corner, rather than being able to resize it from anywhere along an edge. Like the British propensity to have separate hot and cold taps, this seemed completely and unnecessarily idiotic to me, and emblematic surely of further stupidities within.

At some point though I started to see that, like Britain, this little bit of stupidity was an outlier, not in fact emblematic at all. (And that there are third-party tools, such as my beloved Zooom/2, which fix OS X’s window handling to the point that it’s superior to Windows’.)

I was also intrigued and excited by the fact that with OS X the Mac had become Unix-based. I’d used the Unix command-line on Macs at college, and of course all the web hosting servers I worked with were Unix, and I understood that Unix not Microsoft is the true mainstream tradition of computing, and that having this pedigreed solid operating system at bottom and the slickest interface at top is the most impressive operating system yet — a simple elegant GUI for the grannies and a computer’s computer for the techies.

Then, when the MacBook was announced, I was hugely impressed with its physical grace and dimensions, the restraint in having no extraneous words and stickers on it, the innovation of the chiclet keyboard. At the office I was using a desktop but at home I was still using my Sony Vaio on Windows98, as I still had my own clients, and working on that little machine was becoming increasingly less fun. I needed a new computer.

With the Mac’s switch to Intel chips, the fact that it was going to be able to run Windows as well just clinched it for my greedy little mind. Two computer systems for the price of one! So, very soon after the MacBook came out, I bought the black one in a shop on Via Nomentana not far from the Deepend office. The others in the office were both mildly envious because this was the new Mac laptop and their Motorola-driven PowerBooks were now truly old; and also mildly contemptuous because from a materials point of view the plastic MacBook was a step backwards from their classy titanium. I’d never had a metal computer though before so I wasn’t bothered by that and was just very pleased with the machine.

Over time things went wrong with that black MacBook. Chips of plastic fell off around the edges; I lived with it. A hard drive died; I replaced it. The iSight stopped working; I followed instructions on the web to fix it, taking the machine apart, and reconnecting the little webcam, shocked to see that the thing was held in place by sticky tape! (This fix was my most ambitious hardware project ever.) Then recently the motherboard went; Apple replaced it for about £250, renewed the keyboard for about £55, replaced the bezel around the screen for about £5, and now this MacBook is better than it was new. It’s now the second computer, the backup if my late 2009 15” 2.4 GHz 15’‘ MacBook Pro is ever out of action.

Up to a couple of years ago the Sony Vaio was still in the cupboard, but Davide was without a computer, and I gave it to him. Within a few months his ex-girlfriend had reportedly thrown it at a wall, breaking it.

Which takes us to now. So instead I’ll go back further in my computer history.

The first computer I ever saw was Paul Johnson’s. Paul and his brother Mark lived on our street, Hillcrest Drive, in Newton Mearns, Glasgow. Their Dad bought them a Sinclair ZX-81. I was pretty fascinated and patient in trying to get it to write blurry words onto the television screen that I understood to be computer commands. I think even then there was some excitement about the power and potency of this.

Less patient than me, or perhaps more exposed to the darn thing, they gave up and got a Commodore PET. This was a magical step up; from being a thing you connect to the television and lie with on the living room floor, like a video game console, this thing commanded its own permanent corner of the living room and had a real computer keyboard. It looked like something from mission control on a spaceflight. It was exciting to load programs via the cassette player, that noise we knew was a series of instructions that would make characters move on the screen, such as to create the illusion of flight and landscape in the lunar lander game.

It was years later, 1983, when I finally got my own computer. With my Bar Mitzvah money I bought an Apple IIc. This I think was my first weighty and agonizing decision in life, and to this day seems fateful: Go for the Apple IIe with 64k that could be opened up as a hobbyist machine, or the smaller, sleeker and newer IIc with double the memory but a closed case? This was an early precursor to the question of desktop or laptop. I chose laptop, something I knew even then closed certain doors. I felt I was not a hardware guy; similarly, in the 1970’s I’d liked Lego over Meccano, much to my Dad’s disappointment.

That it would be an Apple to me there was no doubt; I wasn’t even considering any other computer. I’d taken a course at ComputerLand, a computer shop and school place at the Golan Center in Ra’anana. All the computers there were Apple II+‘s. I loved it, I really did, and after I took the course they were so impressed with my enthusiasm and competence that they hired me as an assistant teacher. It was my second job ever and paid quite generously for a 12-year-old. Looking back, I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a salaried job as much since.

The Apple IIc stayed as my computer through high school. I used AppleWorks for writing papers and tabulating things like my book, music and comic collections. Even then, I realize now, I had an inkling that this was slightly unhelpful, compulsive behaviour, taking up precious time that would have been better spent on almost anything else, such as programming. But somehow this data entry was sickly pleasurable and felt virtuous as well. I bought an Apple DeskJet printer, also pretty darn expensive, and that was all my Bar Mitzvah money used up.

Amazingly enough, I never had my own computer again until that $2000 Apple PowerBook in New York, 12 years later. (I just realized this now!) In the Israeli army I was exposed to DOS with IBM computers, which were ubiquitous there, and it became my standard operating system. I can’t remember if I still had my Apple IIc running at home at the same time, but I don’t think so; I’d mothballed it and eventually gave it to my Dad, who never used it. Looking back on this, I can see how much I avoid having my head contain the rules for two functionally similar systems simultaneously; it was either Apple or DOS, not both. Similarly, I work today with only one content management system, ExpressionEngine, and don’t touch any others.

I’m trying to remember how I wrote papers at Deep Springs College in 1991/92 without having my own computer. I have just one memory of being in a computer room with David Galbraith and about eight Macs. There must have been another room where there were computers, but I can’t remember, which surprises me, considering how vividly I remember the various computer labs around the University of Chicago campus. I didn’t particularly feel the loss, not having a computer; most people didn’t have one, and it felt normal to use the communal ones, which were everywhere. It’s coming back to me now that I spent a lot of time as an undergraduate with a 3.5’‘ disk in my chest pocket, and also a box of 10 or so of them in my bag. In college I had a bike, a pair of rollerblades, even a car, but not a computer. I’m kind of surprised about that.

S

ince discovering Walter Russell Mead’s blog at The American Interest, his “Antisemitism Saturday” post is the first I’ve found where he’s not crystal clear. It’s about Leon Wieseltier’s “Andrew Sullivan Has a Serious Problem”, Sullivan’s retort, “Something Much Sadder”, and Wieseltier’s consequent “The Trouble with South Park”. WRM hedges between the two ex-friends. On one hand, he writes that on accusing someone of anti-Semitism, “I think Mr. Wieseltier is now discovering, you will almost surely lose.” On the other, he concludes, “I’d rather live in a society in which antisemites are forced to be disingenuous hypocrites…” — presumably referring to Sullivan?

So who does WRM think is right, Leon or Andrew? Is WRM’s muddiness due (a) to his flagging under the amazing pace of his recent output on his blog? Or (b) to some circumspection among his peers? I think it’s the latter, because he flirts with defining anti-Semitism but then backs away, whereas if he took the step of defining it he may have concluded that Wieseltier is correct.

In the 3rd paragraph from the end, WRM asks: “What’s the dividing line between thinking that Jews are powerful in Hollywood (duh), and that the Jews of Hollywood exercise some kind of excessive control over world politics from their citadels in Brentwood?” The dividing line is anti-Semitism. Yes, there is a disproportionate number of Jews there, but they are not conspiring to mind-control of a hapless public. That thought is textbook anti-Semitism.

Then a parallel pair of questions: “Is it antisemitic to hold Israel to a higher moral standard than its neighbors and adversaries?” WRM asks. No, Israel is a democratic liberal state and its enemies are dictatorships and borderline failed states, so of course it should be held to a higher standard. Not to mention that the good guys need to be the good guys, else they stop being the good guys. “Is excessive and disproportionate indignation about Israeli actions evidence of antisemitic attitudes?” Yes, it is; fixation and obsession is not quite a belief in conspiracy, but close enough for me: the pair of questions are parallel, the dividing line is anti-Semitism, and it is in this excessive and disproportionate indignation that Sullivan traffics.

To be fair, Andrew Sullivan also exercises plenty of other popular obsessions and indignations, so rather than accusing him of being an anti-Semite, it seems more accurate, though perhaps less dignifying for his former mentor Wieseltier, to just call him a crank.

Perhaps more interestingly, WRM also asks the main Jewish question in Europe: “Are you an antisemite if you think that the Jews have no right to a ‘national home’ in the Middle East or anywhere else?” That is, have we Europeans, in our guilt, enabled Jews to become powerful new racists in the Middle East, spoiling our dream for a post-racial world? (Never mind fiercely ethnic-based states such as Japan.) And he asks the main Jewish question in America: “Is it antisemitic to wish that Jewish songwriters would ‘leave Christmas alone’ and stop writing secular lyrics for seasonal Christmas songs?” That is, have we, in our tolerance, enabled Jews to become powerful new bigots in the culture wars, spoiling our dream for a liberal cosmopolitan society anchored and spiritualized by Christianity? (Never mind that the secularization of Christmas is a far wider phenomenon.) I’ll revisit these in later Parries, suffice to say for now that I think even considering these as questions demonstrates an anti-Semitic bent. Not that there’s anything too much wrong with that, no more than any other cranky impotent political beliefs at any rate.

Also, I think I need to ponder more on whether obsessing about Israeli actions really is on a par with believing Jews form a conspiracy, that is, whether WRM’s two pairs of questions on Jews in Hollywood and Israel in the Middle East really are parallel. I suspect so, but can’t yet place my finger on why.

F

or the first time I feel some excitement about the presidency of Barack Obama. Nine months after the exultation of electoral victory, he has come crashing down to humiliation and defeat on almost all fronts. In January, the only way was down. Now, the only way is up.

In the wake of his very public defeat over the Chicago Olympics bid (and really, it makes perfect sense that Brazil got it), he need no longer fulfil the role of humanity’s saviour. Instead, he can get back to and on with what is after all his job: leading the USA. So I think it was okay to go to Copenhagen and lobby the IOC and lose. Fine. In fact — and maybe this is very British of me — his having lost makes me like him better.

So today I’m open to the notion that it was wise to make a first move vis-a-vis Russia with the very public gesture of shifting the missile system away from Eastern Europe and seeing how Russia reciprocates regarding Iran. I would wager Russia won’t give anything of value in return, but the missile system move can always be reversed at some point if it bears no fruit.

Recently we’ve already seen the Administration tone down its rhetoric against Israeli settlements and begin backpedalling on closing down Guantanamo Bay. Obama did demonstrate willingness to throw friends under the bus to get elected; hopefully he’ll be willing to do so to his left-wing base now that he has been elected, and continue moving to the center.

All this is presuming of course that he does want to be President of the United States more than he wants to be saviour of humanity. I believe the jury is still out on this, but today in the wake of clear defeat it seems reasonable to hope that the man will hunker down, retrench, and let the majesty and the significance of the office he does hold reach in and touch him and infuse this obviously capable soul with the desire and the will to fulfil the office well.

Which leads us to the one thing hovering over all: Afghanistan. This is the hot war, and as such it rides roughshod over any and all other policy like a set of tank treads. If Obama is feckless here, he will have zero credibility on any other front. And throwing the left under the bus is not enough; he must be steely, adamant in his own personal will to victory. Otherwise it won’t happen.

War may not be what this Commander-in-Chief would like to be doing. Fair enough. Bush would no doubt have preferred to focus on things other than Iraq — remember, the first foreign leader he met with was Vicente Fox of Mexico. But once there is war, everything else, even national disasters at home, is secondary. And furthermore, though not that this really matters too much, Obama didn’t only inherit Afghanistan, he made it his own during the campaign by saying it’s the war that should be fought, rather than Iraq.

So prevailing in Afghanistan is the key to everything else now, even if it requires so much attention that it saps away the energy to do anything else. The problem is that Obama seems not yet to have the will to decisively win the war; the story about his lack of meetings with General Stanley McChrystal, the commander on the ground there, is chilling. But that’s what I mean by the majesty and the significance of the office itself reaching in and touching him. After the minor but public Olympics debacle, the President may ask himself, or hear a portrait of Lincoln or FDR ask him: Where must you prevail first and foremost, Brother 44? And we will get a properly prioritized presidency, a strong America, and the day will be saved once again.