Sherry Chandler

A Debt of Gratitude
Fred Kaplan asks “Why is Bush so obsessed with ungrateful foreigners?”

Bush may have had a political motive in making these remarks. He may have calculated that Americans would be more likely to support the war if the people for whom we’re fighting thanked us publicly for the effort. By the same token, their palpable lack of gratitude, and the war’s deepening unpopularity at home, might have heightened his frustration and impelled such peevish outbursts.

But this peevish imperiousness is precisely what’s most disturbing about Bush’s incessant concern with the proper level of fealty. The word that he repeatedly uses when discussing what he wants from nations he thinks he’s helping—”gratitude”—implies a supplicant’s relationship to his lord.

As Stanley Renshon, a political psychologist at the City University of New York Graduate Center (and generally a Bush supporter), puts it, “Gratitude is something you give to somebody who’s superior. It’s very different from, say, appreciation, which is something that equals give each other.”

The president receives “lessons” from his neoconservative tutors
Glenn Greenwald’s observations on the President’s literary luncheon with Andrew Roberts

Stelzer’s account provides truly illuminating insight into what neoconservatives have been filling the President’s head with for years now, and demonstrates how they have managed to keep him firmly on board with their agenda. The most critical priority is to convince the President to continue to ignore the will of the American people and to maintain full-fledged loyalty to the neoconservative agenda, no matter how unpopular it becomes.

To do this, they have convinced the President that he has tapped into a much higher authority than the American people — namely, God-mandated, objective morality — and as long as he adheres to that (which is achieved by continuing his militaristic policies in the Middle East, whereby he is fighting Evil and defending Good), God and history will vindicate him.

The Mullah
Andrew Sullivan’s review of Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11

This is the central argument of D’Souza’s book: that cultural globalization is the last chance for theoconservatism in its death match with liberal modernity. If a majority of Americans do not support a system of government resting on an external and divine moral order, then the obvious next move is to enlist the billions of fundamentalist believers in the developing world to forge a global alliance. If you combine the premodern patriarchs among the Christians of Africa and Asia and the Muslims of the Middle East and pit them against the degenerate, declining individualists in the West, a global theoconservative victory is possible.

That is D’Souza’s vision, and he is not shy about it. The test case for this strategy can be seen most graphically in the Anglican Church. Theoconservative Episcopalians in Northern Virginia have sought protection under a Nigerian prelate who believes that even speech about homosexuality should be criminalized. If theoconservatism cannot work as a governing majority in the First World, then it is time to forge an alliance between half of America with the Third World.

Kenneth Rexroth on the “Greatest Generation” of American Letters:

Those were the days of the famous Lost Generation, the “expatriates.” There wasn’t anything particularly lost or expatriate about them. Most of them were well off to begin with, had a vacation for a couple of years in Europe, and went back to successful careers in America. For Lost read alcoholic. For expatriates read tourists. They lived abroad for two reasons: the power of the dollar over the runaway currency inflation in Europe, and the prohibition of alcoholic drinks in America. The fact that they were abroad seems to have obsessed them. They thought of themselves as exiles and they were continuously attacked by the American Establishment, and in fact often still are today, because they were living abroad. They felt guilty about it and wrote patriotic books like Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return and Archibald MacLeish’s New Found Land.

Althought they bought drinks in the Dôme and Rotonde for most of the leading personalities of the European avant-garde, the contemporary revolutions in European art, letters, and politics scarcely touched most of them. It was considered bourgeois to go to galleries and utterly demented to go to the Louvre and few of them read French for pleasure and spoke very little. The ordinary French people and the cops on Montparnasse called them ou ests—”ooh ay lee cafey Dome?”

— from American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (The seabury Press, 1973)