The Killers break out the feathers and oddness

By Mark Kennedy
Associated Press
Tuesday, December 2, 2008

NEW YORK -- The Killers are back, and this time they’ve brought the weird. The Las Vegas quartet’s third studio album “Day & Age” sees them tapping into a little of their hometown’s oddness in both new image and sound.

They break out steel drums, harpsichords and horns. They sing about alien abduction. Their new stage outfits feature animal prints and plumage.

“The word ‘playful’ keeps coming up,” says Brandon Flowers, the singer and keyboardist. “We just really had fun. And I think it shows in the album.”

It’s a gaudy new direction for the synth-rock group that emerged in 2004 with the singles-driven “Hot Fuss” and disappointed some when they went to cowboy country with the follow-up, “Sam’s Town.”

Flowers — along with guitarist Dave Keuning, bassist Mark Stoermer and drummer Ronnie Vannucci — say the new album is their most pop-y and also most experimental.

“You can have both, right?” asks the 27-year-old, baby-faced Flowers during a recent interview alongside Keuning, the long-haired, 32-year-old yin to his bandmate’s yang.

The new 10-song CD has stuff you can dance to — the Tears For Fears-like “The World We Live In” and the funky “Joy Ride” — straight-ahead pop with “Losing Touch” and rock opera on “Goodnight, Travel Well.”

“The pop instinct is definitely glowing right now for us. It’s like pulsing,” says Flowers.

“It’s radiating,” Keuning agrees.

Speaking of glowing, what’s up with the song “Spaceman”? In it, Flowers sings about aliens abducting him from his bed, cutting him open and leaving “a strange impression in my head.”

“I was taken,” says Flowers, trying to be completely serious until he cracks up. “I can laugh about it now. It was kind of cathartic to sing about it.”

“I also was taken,” Keuning says. “Hours of my life are missing.”

Their goofiness bleeds into the first single, “Human,” in which Flowers asks “Are we human/Or are we dancer?” The song was inspired by a comment Hunter S. Thompson made about how America was raising a generation of dancers.

Then there’s the outfits: The Wyatt Earp mustaches from their last album are gone. But they haven’t returned to the pastels, suits and eyeliner of their debut.

“There are a lot of tiger prints. And feathers,” says Flowers. “There’s all kinds of things going on. It took 12 millions records sold to break out the feathers. I don’t know why.”

The Killers were born when Flowers came across Keuning’s classified ad seeking bandmates. It mentioned his love for the British group Oasis.

The band took it’s name from a New Order video and banged out hits like “Mr. Brightside,” “Somebody Told Me” and “All These Things That I’ve Done,” selling out stadiums and snagging Grammy nominations.

But all the fuss, they insist, hasn’t changed them. They recall their pre-fame lives — Keuning worked at a Banana Republic and Flowers was a hotel bellhop.

“I don’t feel different,” says Flowers. “I can still remember asking my boss for Friday off because we were playing at a bar. It’s the same. It’s just the bar is bigger.”


The Killers
Day & Age
(Island)
US release date: 25 November 2008
UK release date: 24 November 2008

Review by Michael Franco
PopMatters Associate Music Editor
http://www.popmatters.com/
December 2, 2008

Yes, Brandon… We Are Dancer

Before the release of the Killers’ sophomore album, 2006’s Sam’s Town, Brandon Flowers predicted that it would be “one of the best albums of the last 20 years”. For a band that left many feeling they had not earned their spurs before achieving superstardom, the comment was an irresistible invitation to pummel Flowers for artistic hubris. And many critics did just that, especially since Sam’s Town—while containing some undeniable classics—was an uneven affair, capturing the band juggling diverse influences, sometimes to awkward effect.

Flowers’ excitement, however, was understandable. He was under the spell of Springsteen and U2, and the band tried, quite obviously, to create the same epic intensity in the songs on Sam’s Town. The two “hits” from the album, “When You Were Young” and “Read My Mind”, succeeded in evoking that feeling of epiphany that the Boss and Bono specialize in, that feeling of transcendence that one only experiences in fleeting moments at Mass or when falling in love or, well, when drunk and loading up the jukebox.

And yet, Flowers was still faulted for mixing his metaphors and gushing like a schoolgirl and managing to sound only like the young Springsteen, the one who confused verbosity with profundity. But so what if, technically, you couldn’t burn down the highway skyline if you were riding on a body of water? That was a kick-ass tune! And can you really fault a guy for trying to share his epiphany with the masses? Saul of Tarsus did the same, and he was canonized.

So with the release of the Killers’ latest album, Day & Age, the obvious question is: will Flowers and company continue to chase the panoramic, mythic grandeur of Springsteen and U2, critics be damned? Or, having experienced the sting of critical backlash, will they play it safe and make a collection of those dance floor ditties they seem to churn out with ease?

The answer isn’t quite so easy. On the surface, the answer would seem to be that the Killers are retreating from their epic ambitions and heading for safer ground. Those the-whole-world-depends-on-this-moment lyrics are largely missing, as are those majestic climaxes and crescendos that were everywhere on Sam’s Town. Indeed, Day & Age is an album devoid of pomposity, both lyrically and sonically. That’s not to say the album doesn’t have its climactic moments—the completely sublime “A Dustland Fairytale” has all of those qualities—but they’re certainly fewer.

Flowers seems to concede as much in the first single from the album, “Human”. “Give my regards to soul and romance,” he sings, “They always did the best they could.” Is this an admission that all that lyrical loftiness was misguided? Or is this just a nonsense line, such as the lines “Are we human? / Or are we dancer?”, which, apparently, are a reference to Hunter S. Thompson?

To say, however, that Flowers and the Killers cowered artistically would not only be a complete mischaracterization, it would also miss the point entirely. The inescapable conclusion is this: Day & Age is the most consistent, confident album the Killers have created so far. While there are just as many influences floating through this album as there were on Hot Fuss and Sam’s Town, they have finally congealed into a unified whole.

To be sure, there are traces of Low-era Bowie, the Cure, the Talking Heads, the Jam, and even Roxy Music, but there aren’t any songs here that sound like painfully-calculated imitations of a specific band. Instead, three albums into their career, the Killers have finally digested their influences and settled into their own sound. So, if anything, this is the quartet’s boldest album, seeing them finally step out from behind their record collection and asserting themselves as a creative force.

While the Killers have always straddled the muddy line between a “dance” band and a “rock” band (the thin distinction warrants the quotation marks since rock music was always intended to be dance music), Day & Age definitely sees them leaning towards the former. In place of the acute intensity the band aimed for the last time around is groove, pulse, and –- dare it be said -– funk.

“Joy Ride”, for example, begins with a galloping bassline reminiscent of Roxy Music’s “The Space Between” before settling into a dance track that actually manages to sound soulful, thanks to some well-placed saxophone. Yes, saxophone –- and it appears throughout the album, such as on the opener “Losing Touch”, which also sounds like it emerged from that late ‘70s/early ‘80s period that was trying to combine the often competing ethos of disco, punk, and soul.

Elsewhere, it sounds like the boys have been listening to that rather vaporous genre known as world music. The most obvious proof of that is “I Can’t Stay”, the song that will, without doubt, elicit the most head scratches. If you’ve ever wondered what the Killers would sound like as the house band on a Carnival Cruise Line, this is your answer. Once the initial “WTF?” moment passes, the song is actually an enjoyable, breezy little ditty. Utterly disposable, yes, but that’s part of its charm.

The bulk of the album, though, sees the Killers doing what they do best: crafting new wave dance songs that sound like lost classics from the ‘80s. “Spaceman”, “Neon Tiger”, and “Human” are all worthy of a John Hughes soundtrack, had they been written 25 years earlier. Synthy, poppy, and often touching, they are all irresistible pop confections.

For those, however, who love the dreamy-eyed Brandon Flowers and yearn for those overpowering moments, don’t despair. Flowers just can’t help himself when it comes to certain themes, and on “A Dustland Fairytale” he crafts yet another tale of young suitor-as-Messiah, swooping down to rescue a naïve maiden, only to reveal later that, yes, he is nothing but a man with faults. Flowers sets the scene by describing a “slick chrome American prince” and a “blue jean serenade” before crying “’Moon River’, what did you do to me?” As the song reaches its emotional summit, it’s decades later and the couple is desperately trying to keep the fire alive: “Cinderella don’t you go to sleep… don’t you know the kingdom’s under siege?”

And this is what makes the Killers so endearing, despite all their faults as a band. Their affection for everything they pour into their music, from the million and one musical influences to the shameless lyrical homages to the awkward literary references, is so sincere it can’t help but be charming.

So yes, Brandon… we are dancer.



The Killers enter a new 'Day & Age'


Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times

The Killers' third studio album, "Day & Age," is their furthest-reaching yet: a mélange of Roxy Music saxophone pomp, roller-rink disco and jittery synth rave-ups supporting Brandon Flowers' newly surrealist lyrics.




'Sam's Town' drew some flak, but the band is talking back as it plays around with its sound (and facial hair).

By August Brown
The Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com
November 29, 2008

When the Killers' singer Brandon Flowers crossed the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood before a recent taping of " Jimmy Kimmel Live," he displayed the first sign that the band was beginning anew: He lacked a mustache.

Around the time of the Killers' 2006 second album, "Sam's Town," Flowers grew a thick push broom worthy of that record's grandiloquent Americana. Drummer Ronnie Vannucci one-upped him with a fearsome Fu Manchu, and bassist Mark Stoermer let his blond scruff run wild. That album's unapologetic Springsteen-philia proved something of a critical brick, however, and Flowers' pronouncement that "Sam's Town" was "one of the best albums in the past 20 years" made the record ripe for dissenting opinions.

Those whiskers are gone now, and Flowers' preferred accessory for his "Kimmel" performance was a natty schoolboy jacket with feather epaulets. Guitarist Dave Keuning wore a barely there synthetic tiger-print shirt, and the band's stage setup was littered with glowing faux palm trees befitting its hometown of Las Vegas. The Killers' third studio album, "Day & Age," released Tuesday, is their furthest-reaching yet: a mélange of Roxy Music saxophone pomp, roller-rink disco and jittery synth rave-ups supporting Flowers' newly surrealist lyrics.

Rock music is down to maybe a half-dozen bands who consistently reinvent themselves and still go platinum each time. But after their grand ambitions for "Sam's Town" met a fairly resounding shrug from tastemakers -- and moved about half of "Hot Fuss' " 3 million copies in the U.S. -- the question remains: Will the Killers' second attempt at an aesthetic makeover keep them in that ever-rarer clique?

"I let [those criticisms] affect me a lot," Flowers said. "But one thing we gained from it was that when we came back to the towns where those reviews were, we'd just play louder and we became a really great live band. It took that confidence to do what we did with this album."

In some ways, "Day & Age" feels like a direct riposte to the earnest and old-fashioned American arena rock ideals behind "Sam's Town." The new single "Human," a pillowy and remix-ready sliver of synth-pop, has already yielded one of 2008's most head-scratching and grammatically suspect choruses, now familiar to anyone who has spent time with rock radio recently: "Are we human / or are we dancer?"

Other lyrics seem to offer eulogies for the band's turn at whiskey-and-highways mythology, like when Flowers asks to "Give my regards to soul and romance, they always did the best they could," or in "Spaceman," in which Flowers ironically reassures himself that "The song-maker says it ain't so bad." On "Day & Age's" first track, "Losing Touch," Flowers more directly taunts the band's skeptics: "You go run and tell your friends I'm losing touch / Fill their heads with rumors of impending doom / It must be true."

But despite "Day & Age's" critical ruminations, the band's famed self-assurance seems to have survived the reception of "Sam's Town" intact.

"I love the challenge of playing to naysayers," drummer Vannucci said. "I love that I can drive it home and make believers out of people."

The band usually doesn't have to try hard to do so: Upon striding into the Roosevelt lobby, Vannucci was instantly encircled by a small pack of starry-eyed autograph seekers. Between songs at the "Kimmel" performance later that day, Flowers said to the crowd, "We only want to please you," reaffirming the idea that "Day & Age's" pointedly eclectic genre-hopping still aims straight at the audience's pop pleasure centers. The laser-sharp funk bass lines of "Joy Ride" and margarita-ready bossa nova of "I Can't Stay" shouldn't have any business being on the same record, but the Killers have spent enough time on the pop charts to wrangle a worthy single from any stray arrangement idea. On the recent B-sides collection "Sawdust," it even turned a cover of the notoriously dour Joy Division song "Shadowplay" into a charting mainstream rock hit.

"There's a big misconception that you can't be artistic or sophisticated and be big," Flowers said. "We should be praised for being on alternative radio and pop radio and doing the things that we do. It's not like anything else."

Part of the credit for the album's coherence belongs to new producer Stuart Price, who midwifed the record at the band's new home studio five minutes off the Vegas Strip. The band recorded "Sam's Town" in a studio located in the heart of the Palms Casino, a coolly designed place that Flowers described as having "weird ideas about what a couch should be."

The new home studio sports the more metaphorically apt name Battle Born, taken from the Nevada state flag. It's a functional symbol of a band trying to slough off expectations while nursing open ambitions to remain one of the biggest acts in rock music. The band doesn't really have a peer in the American rock scene that can claim similar platinum sales and ambitions to resurrect Dire Straits as a hip influence.

Eyes to the future

Naturally, the band's label, Island Records, has a lot riding on the Killers' ability to thread that needle, especially after losing the band's A&R representative, Rob Stevenson, to a post leading Virgin Records in the U.S.

" 'Day & Age' is yet another brilliant album from a band I believe is poised to become the biggest and best in the world," said Island Def Jam Music Group chairman Antonio "L.A." Reid. "The Killers continue to make me excited about the future of rock music."

The 27-year-old Flowers also has the future of a young family to look out for. His wife, Tana, gave birth to a son last year, and the frequently eyelinered singer of a band who's written at length about cocaine blues ("Uncle Jonny") and gender-swapping hookups ("Somebody Told Me") is said to enjoy an unusually idyllic home life in Vegas.

Flowers' onstage presence as a fashion-flaunting rake is mercurial, however. Along with his stable young family, he's quite possibly America's hippest Mormon rock singer. Flowers makes a point of keeping his faith -- and his opinions on his church's recent financial support of Proposition 8, which eliminated the right of same-sex couples to marry in California -- private and separate from his band's limelight.

"I'm going to stop you right now," Flowers said, with a sheepish laugh and a few beats of shifting in the Roosevelt lobby's leather chairs, when asked his thoughts about the controversial ballot initiative. "It's strange to be in a position to be asked these things and that anyone would care what I have to say."

Strange position or not, Flowers' ideas about pushing rock music forward in a market of ever-dwindling album sales are some of the few systems that still seem to be working. For all the make-or-break anxiety about "Day & Age," the band made a point to carve out time for its third Christmas-themed single for (RED)WIRE, a new subscription-based music service benefiting HIV efforts in Africa. Fashions, genres and lyrics about depressed neon felines come and go, but the annual holiday novelty hit is one thing that the Killers will never, ever waver on.

"As long as we're going, we'll have a new Christmas song every December," Flowers said. Vannucci agreed: "You know that things are dark if we don't have a Christmas single."

Brown is a Times staff writer.

august.brown@latimes.com

Che, or a Statue of an Actor Playing Che

By David Gonzalez

The New York Times
December 2, 2008, 7:00 am — Updated: 10:42 am -->

(Photo: David Gonzalez/The New York Times)

Che Guevara has been put on a pedestal in Manhattan. This is something not lacking in irony, since Manhattan might not exist today had the Argentine-born, Cuban-tested revolutionary had his way and unleashed the Soviet nukes against the United States during the 1962 missile crisis.

Are New Yorkers really allowing such an homage to occupy the southeast corner of Central Park? Technically, no. The statue actually depicts a Barcelona street performer portraying Che, part of three bronze sculptures by Christian Janowski, which were recently installed by the Public Art Fund.Such distinctions may be lost on passers-by, who may well think the temporary installation is a marketing stunt for the upcoming Benicio del Toro movie, “Guerrilla.”

Monday morning, passers-by whipped out cellphones to snap quick shots of the statue. Some tourists put down their maps long enough to stand next to the statue and flash a peace sign. Most assumed the bronze was of Che (even if the figure was thicker and bore little facial resemblance to the real thing).

“That’s Che Guevara, right?” said Sean Kelly, who was visiting from Ames, Iowa. “I’m kind of interested in his beliefs and the kind of stuff he did.”

There were the executions when he presided over the prison at La Cabaña. Or his stated willingness to have let the missiles fly had they been under Cuban control, according to a newspaper interview cited by the biographer Jon Lee Anderson. And as several conservative commentators have noted, soon after the 1962 crisis, Che was preparing to export revolution while Cuban diplomats in New York were implicated in a plot to blow up, among other targets, department stores in New York City on the day after Thanksgiving. (More examples can be found in Humberto Fontova’s book “Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him.”)

For some, the statue might call to mind the recent controversy over a banner depicting Stalin at Cooper Union. Arguably, one does not have to be politically conservative to be appalled by idolization of Che Guevara; just being a New Yorker ought to be reason enough. Instead, his face is a common sight on T-shirts, posters and watches (the latter sold, briefly, in the gift shop at the New York Public Library).

“I am always fascinated to see all the examples of how, I don’t know, foolish and ill-informed people are,” said a man who gave his name as Peter. “I’m a student of the idiocy of Che Guevara worship, and I bet 99 percent of the people who see this think, wow, that’s cool. But he was just a thug. A butcher.”

So, what is the appeal?

“He fought for the ideals of the people,” said David Araya, a bike messenger who is originally from Costa Rica. “He believed in socialist liberation for people who were oppressed by corrupt governments at the time in South America.”

He added that now today’s Cuba might fall into that category, too, considering that the Castro brothers have been in power for almost half a century. For some Cubans, liberation means rolling the dice on a raft trip across the Florida Straits.

There are no statues erected to them in New York. But remember, the piece in the park is not of Che. Only of someone portraying Che.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/che-or-a-statue-of-an-actor-playing-che/?scp=2&sq=che%20guevara&st=cse

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - Dream Baby Dream (Live 2005)

(Click on title to play video)

Barack Obama and the FDR Myth

By Michael Fumento
http://www.townhall.com/
December 1, 2008

The cover of Time magazine (11/24/08) has Barack Obama photoshopped into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous convertible, complete with oval-shaped glasses and cigarette holder held between the teeth. “The NEW New Deal,” The cover reads. Surely many who voted for Obama saw him as potentially the new FDR, the man to lead us out of hard economic times.

But they’ve been misled, for even FDR wasn’t FDR. He is a quasi-mythical creature who not only didn’t end the Great Depression but probably greatly prolonged the nation’s economic agony with his New Deal programs and a menagerie of other foolish measures.

Just look at the numbers from Bureau of Labor Statistics, Survey of Current Business. Unemployment from 1923 to 1929 averaged a mere 3.3%. In FDR’s first year, 1933, it hit its high point of 24.9%. Joblessness did decline for the next three years to 14.3% in 1936, but that’s still deep in depression territory.

The next year unemployment actually spiked up and didn’t fall to 1936 levels again until 1941. “By June 1937, writes Marquette University economic historian Gene Smiley in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, “the recovery...was over.”

Even FDR Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau admitted the New Deal had failed. “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work,” he declared in 1939. “We have never made good on our promises...I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started...And an enormous debt to boot!”

Finally war came to the rescue. America began exporting huge amounts of food and equipment first to Britain and then the Soviets, even as it geared up its own war machine that was practically non-existent in 1940. Joblessness inevitably plummeted as over eight million Americans joined the military in less than two years.

Was it really The New Deal that doubled the GDP from 1939 to 1943 or that slashed unemployment by two-thirds just from 1940 to 1942 and then cut even the 1942 figure by more than half the next year?

The grotesque reality is that it wasn’t an American aristocrat who led us out of the Great Depression but a monstrous Austrian corporal.One reason the New Deal couldn’t end the Depression and probably extended it is because it wasn’t merely a quick economic boost or the shoring up of vital institutions that, once fallen, might set off a domino effect on other businesses.

Rather, over many years its programs merely swiped money from the relatively efficient private sector and gave it to government programs that were often deliberately inefficient. Anybody familiar with the architecture of structures built under the Works Progress Administration knows they are readily identified by their use of too much material, too much space, and hence too much labor.

As free-market economist Henry Hazlitt observed in his classic 1946 book, Economics in One Lesson: “For every public job created by [a] bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else. We can see the men employed on the bridge. We can watch them at work...But there are other things that we do not see, because, alas, they have never been permitted to come into existence.”

Yet Obama apparently either doesn’t know his history or doesn’t care. He’s just proposed what one news outlet called “a monster new 'new deal,'” supposedly a two-year plan aiming to create or protect 2.5 million jobs with massive deficit spending.

FDR also spooked entrepreneurs, corporations, and would-be stock market investors with a tremendous tax attack. The income tax top marginal rate increased to 79% between 1930 and 1940, the corporate income tax rate doubled from 12 to 24%, and Roosevelt tacked on an “excess profits” tax to boot. He imposed an excise tax on dividends, liquor taxes, and a capital stock tax, while increasing liquor taxes. Finally, he instituted the Social Security payroll tax with a 2% rate.

UCLA economists Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian assert that but for New Deal anti-free market measures, the Depression would have ended in 1936. In a paper for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, they observed Roosevelt believed excessive business competition led to low prices and wages.

Therefore, FDR “came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25% above where they ought to have been, given market forces. “The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies," Cole said in separate comments.

Other economists, including Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas Jr. and the late Leonard Rapping concluded that the steady expansion of the money supply, but for FDR’s influence, should have ended the Depression in 1935.

And for all the talk about the uplifting effect of his “fireside chat” pep talks on the common man, he scared away those he needed to reassure most – those with money to invest – with his blame-business rhetoric and his incessant new economic experiments. The market abhors uncertainty; the New Deal was uncertainty incarnate.

Only the most obstinate Democrat-hater hopes the economy won’t recover during Obama’s first term. But to the extent he imitates that guy with the cigarette holder – and he’s seems determined to do so – brace yourself for Great Depression II.


- Michael Fumento is a, journalist, and attorney specializing in science and health issues as well as author of BioEvolution: How Biotechnology is Changing Our World .

Lost Illusions

What really happened in Mumbai.

By Arthur Herman
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 01, 2008, 9:40 a.m.

It’s been fascinating, but also disheartening, to watch the mainstream media completely miss the real story about the 60-hour terrorist rampage in Mumbai, India — which may have killed as many as 300 people, and has certainly injured hundreds more. What died in Mumbai — besides scores of innocent people in their hotel rooms and at the Mumbai Jewish Cultural Center and on the blood-drenched platform at Chatrapathi Sivaji railway terminal — were certain illusions about the war on terror, and how to deal with terrorists.

One of those illusions is about who is fighting whom in the war on terror.


Participants in the candlelight march toward the Oberoi Hotel. "I think their intention was to kill as many people as possible and do as much physical damage as possible," said P. R. S. Oberoi, chairman of the Oberoi Group, which manages the hotel.
Photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Many put the blame for the attack on years of Indian-Pakistani hostility and tension. In fact, relations between the two countries have never been warmer. This past month, Pakistan’s new president stunned and delighted Indians by publicly renouncing any first use of nuclear weapons. Violence in Kashmir, the principal bone of contention between India and Pakistan since 1947, is on the decline. Before the Mumbai attacks, politicians were scheduled to start talks on permitting trade across the region’s Line of Control, so that Hindu farmers in Indian Kashmir can sell their wheat or a used tractor to Muslim farmers in Pakistani Kashmir.

This is precisely what the terrorists don’t want, of course. It’s the fact that tensions over Kashmir are diminishing that prompted them to attack on the November 28 — just as al-Qaeda blew up Samarra’s Golden Mosque in Iraq back in 2006 in order to keep Shias and Sunnis hating and killing each other. The illusion that formal agreements between peoples and governments — whether between India and Pakistan or Israel and the Palestinian Authority — can somehow defuse the terrorist problem was the among the first casualties in Mumbai. Terrorists see it the other way around: the relaxation of tensions is a problem requiring bloodshed.

Islamic terrorists don’t want justice or respect for their beliefs, or restoration of some imaginary homeland. They want violence and death. The duty of every government is to make sure that terrorists get them before they can deal them out. Pakistanis will never know peace, or peace with their neighbors in Afghanistan and India, until they finally and ruthlessly root out the terrorists in their midst.

The same goes for India. That was the second illusion that died in Mumbai: that democratic nations can somehow opt out of the war on terror. India has largely operated on that assumption since 2001, even though it is home to the second-largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia, and wedged between two neighbors — Pakistan and Bangladesh — where Islamic terrorist groups operate in relative freedom.

The media here and in India seem to have forgotten that this was not the first round of mass death in Mumbai. Bombings rocked the city back in the summer of 2005, killing more than 200, followed by bloody attacks on Jaipur and India’s high-tech capital, Bangalore, earlier this year.

In spite of this, India’s record on counterterrorism is abysmal, almost deliberately so. The government in New Delhi steadfastly maintains a wall of separation between law-enforcement agencies like the one that used to separate the FBI and CIA before the Patriot Act, and keeps counterterrorist units underfunded and undermanned. It has repeatedly given way to the demands of Islamic radical groups and fundamentalist lobbyists in the name of “cultural sensitivity.” India was the first non-Islamic country to ban Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses back in 1988.

India has no preventive detention laws; no laws to protect the identity of anti-terrorist witnesses; and no laws to allow domestic wiretapping without court order. In 2004, the new Congress Party government revoked India’s version of the Patriot Act, even as the Indian media was loudly condemning the U.S. for “torture” at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.

In short, the Indian government has waged the war on terror in much the same way that liberals and many Democrats have been urging the U.S. to carry it out. The result is that more than 4,000 Indians have died in attacks since 2004 — more than any other nation in the war on terror besides Iraq.

At the Sivaji rail platform on the November 28, eyewitnesses told the Belfast Telegraph that armed Indian police refused to shoot back when the terrorists opened fire. Even when the terrorists stopped to reload their guns, someone screamed at the police: “Shoot them, they’re sitting ducks!” But the police did nothing, only to be gunned down like everyone else.

Sitting ducks. One reason the Mumbai terrorists sought out Brits and Americans to kill is that they can’t get at them in their own countries. The latest report is that those “evil” U.S. intelligence agencies had actually intercepted threats about possible attacks on hotels in Mumbai, and passed them on to their Indian counterparts — who then failed to take action.

Britain and the United States have learned how to deal effectively with terrorism the hard way. Maybe this time Indians will, as well.

— Arthur Herman is the author of Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, published this year by Bantam/Dell.

For the future of hip hop, all that glitters is not gold teeth

By Stanley Crouch
The New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/index.html
Monday, December 1st 2008, 4:00 AM

It continues to appear that the cool and highly intelligent Barack Obama is going to have a powerful impact on debilitating black popular culture, particularly hip hop. The signs are everywhere.

In the wake of Byron Hurt's searing documentary "Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes," hip-hop fans have questioned the retarding effect that hip hop has had on young black men through encouraging thuggish violence, misogyny, clownish behavior and crude materialism.


Barack Obama and Ludacris

Hurt's documentary is most powerful because the filmmaker himself is a fan of the idiom but, as a grown and responsible man, he felt it was necessary to call out hip hop's many shortcomings because the idiom had moved from clever rhymes and dance beats to advocating personal, social and criminal corruption.

Those who pretend that they do not know what Hurt is investigating because "that is not ALL of hip hop" need to take note of the fact that Russell Simmons, the godfather of hip hop, recently blamed the deep vulgarization of the genre on producers who would do anything for a buck. "Some producers have found that dirt sells," says the godfather. How now, brown cow?

Simmons is nothing if not clever and senses that the arrival of Barack and Michelle Obama could mean things are going to change. One would not at all be smart to defend the "authenticity" of pimps, supposed whores (all women, actually), misogyny, thuggery and the rest. Pimps up, ho's down, as they say.

Before he was elected President, Obama said in an interview with MTV News that there was no need for laws against teenage hip-hop dress but that young black men "should pull up their pants."

A friend of mine who lives in California remarked to his grandson that he did not like the way rappers dressed or carried themselves. His grandson told him that he needs to stop living in the past and catch up before the plane leaves.

My friend noticed, as usual, that his grandson did not dress or carry himself in the style or manner he was defending. So he decided to ask him some questions. Shoot, said the young man, ready to straighten out his grandfather.

If you were on a plane waiting to take off, my friend asked him, and the pilot and the co-pilot came on with their pants sagging to the ground, covered with tattoos, mouths full of gold teeth and wearing braids, what would you do? His grandson told him he would get off the plane as fast as he could. No doubt.

My friend then asked if his grandson's baby daughter had been hurt and she was taken to the emergency room, how would he feel if the doctors on duty looked like the men about to fly the plane. "I would," said the younger man, "get her the hell out of there."

At that point, my friend wondered what would happen to young black men who showed up looking for work but seemed more ready for a hip-hop performance than for a job?

The answer: They probably would not get hired. Case closed.

I believe our next President will elevate many things in our country, top to bottom. On the pop cultural end, Barack and Michelle Obama's worldliness and common sense will greatly diminish the national appetite for and the defense of those who proudly commit intellectual suicide by submitting to anti-intellectual stances and the surface styles that repel across all ethnic lines. We are on the way out of the muck. Ask Russell Simmons. Good hustlers always know when the game is changing.

crouch.stanley@gmail.com

The Army of Mohammad on the Attack

by Clare M. Lopez (more by this author)
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=29702
Posted 12/01/2008 ET


Indian soldiers stand guard as candles are placed outside the Taj Mahal hotel in memory of those killed by Islamic militants in Mumbai. India has warned that the Mumbai attacks had dealt a "grave setback" to relations with Pakistan, as the United States urged Islamabad to show "absolute" cooperation with India's probe into the assault.
(AFP/Sajjad Hussain)

Intelligence experts and Sunday morning talk show guests struggled over the weekend to make sense of the Mumbai terror attacks. The basic facts about the horrific events that riveted the world are now emerging and not so difficult to ascertain. The analytical contortions of national security chiefs, politicians, the mainstream media, and so-called Middle East specialists who all seem desperate to avoid calling this what it is -- Islamic Jihad -- are somewhat less understandable.

The basic facts seem to be these: Muslim commandos belonging to the Pakistani Lashkar-e Toiba terrorist organization, likely in coordination with Hindi-speaking attackers belonging to an off-shoot of the Indian Mujahideen (calling themselves the “Deccan Mujahideen”), launched a wave of terrorist assaults against Mumbai last week that has left some 200 people dead and over 300 injured.

A couple dozen highly trained, intensely motivated terrorists, perhaps with the logistical assistance of a Mumbai organized crime figure named Dawood Ibrahim, paralyzed a modern urban metropolis of nearly 15 million people for 60 hours. They used basic military assault tactics, employing small arms and grenades against carefully selected and meticulously cased soft civilian targets, including the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Hotels, the city train station, hospitals, and a Jewish cultural center.

Lashkar-e Toiba (LeT) is a Pakistani terrorist group founded in the late 1980s to early 1990s by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organization to mount a terror campaign against the Indian government and Hindu civilians living in the contested Kashmir valley between India and Pakistan. LeT (‘The Army of the Pure’) is reported to be a member of Usama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders, the loose network of Islamists that declared war in 1998 against America, the Jewish people, and liberal democratic civilians everywhere.

After LeT was implicated in the 2001 attacks on the Indian Parliament, the Pakistani government in January 2002 banned LeT, but its members simply went underground and continued to train in camps inside Pakistan and Kashmir. Indeed, even as the horrific attacks of last week were ongoing, it is now known from captured SIM cards and satellite phones that the young Islamist gunmen were making phone calls traced back to a LeT training chief inside Pakistan.

The previously unknown Deccan Mujahideen are likely affiliated with the Indian Mujahideen, which themselves are an offshoot of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). After the May 2008 attacks in Jaipur, it was the Indian Mujahideen that issued a statement warning that more attacks would follow unless India decoupled itself from its strategic alliance with the United States. Whatever the many name changes effected by these South Asian terror groups, all of them are Jihadist groups with links back to al-Qa’eda.

It is the self-proclaimed jihadist nature of these groups that should leave no doubt about how they view themselves. Their ideological identification with Islam is not disguised; they are not ashamed of it, they do not attempt to deny it or hide it. Only we, who are their intended targets, do that.

Sen. Richard Lugar, a respected veteran Republican congressman from Indiana, actually called the Mumbai terrorists “dissidents.” The Mumbai terrorists are not dissidents, nor are they merely criminal ‘gunmen’ or ‘militants.’ They are Muslim jihadis who believe they are following the doctrine of their faith, the example of the Prophet Muhammad, and the explicit orders of Allah to wage war against unbelievers. They have nearly six centuries of Arab Muslim razzias (or war raids) conducted from the seventh to the 13th centuries to serve as historical precedent, when the followers of Muhammad’s early warriors launched wave after wave of savage military campaigns against India’s Hindu and Buddhist populations.

The partition of British India in 1947 was intended to allow both Muslims and Hindus to live in a state where their own faith predominated. But there are still some 200 million Muslims living in India today -- and in any case, any territory once governed by Sharia under Muslim rule is considered by Islamist jihadis to be Muslim land in perpetuity, to be returned to Islam by force if necessary.


In this Nov. 26, 2008 file photo, a gunman identified by police as Ajmal Qasab walks at the Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminal railway station in Mumbai, India. Qasab, the only gunman captured after a 60-hour terrorist siege of Mumbai said he belonged to a Pakistani militant group with links to the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, a senior police officer said Sunday Nov. 30, 2008.
(AP Photo/Mumbai Mirror, Sebastian D'souza, File)

Discussion and analysis of the commando-style terrorist tactics employed by the Mumbai attackers will go on. Part will have to examine initial failures by some members of the Indian security services, who actually hid instead of confronting the assailants. The most important lessons to be learned are already clear, however: Islamic jihadis are adaptable and ruthless and all who stand in the way of their quest for domination will be their targets.

The recent attacks in Mumbai, India’s largest city, its financial center, and its gateway to the globalized world, clearly are intended to inflict economic harm. By striking well-known landmark hotels such as the Taj Mahal, filled with foreign tourists, and demonstrating the ease with which the city’s security forces could be utterly immobilized, the jihadis not only destroy physical infrastructure that will have to be rebuilt, but more importantly, they strike fear into the infidel enemy, whose business and tourists will be a long time returning to Mumbai and maybe India itself.

This is straight out of Jihadist military doctrine as documented by Pakistani Brig. S.K. Malik in his classic 1971 book, ‘The Quranic Concept of War’, in which he makes clear that terror is not just the means, it is ‘the end itself’. In turn, as his book title indicates, Brig. Malik was only conveying what is commanded by Allah himself in the Quran, which is to ‘strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers’ (Q 8:12).

By singling out American and British citizens and by deliberately targeting the Jewish Chabad House cultural center, these jihadis also made clear that their target is not only Hindus and not only India because it is democratic, free, and Hindu. The selection of these targets, as well as the complete absence of any demands made by the attackers in return for their hostages’ lives, indicates the real nature and the real objectives of these jihadis. It is Americans, British, and Jews (including Israelis) because we lead the opposition to their murderous campaign of conquest and are the only ones who can stop it.

It is the U.S., the U.K., Israel and our allies that today man the front lines in the war against Islamic Jihad. Now India too must make the decision once again to stand against Jihad.

We who value tolerant liberal democracy must wake up and quickly. We are at war. We are at war whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we’d prefer to focus on education and health care or not. The enemy is Islamic Jihad. Jihadis formally declared war on us in 1996 and again in 1998. They are coming for us and intend to conquer our societies in the name of Islam, whether with gunfire and bombs or by the soft jihad of infiltration and subversion.

They already have come for us in Baghdad, Bali, Glasgow, Jerusalem, London, Madrid, New York, Washington, D.C., and now Mumbai. We defeated them in Iraq, and we are fighting hard to defeat them in Afghanistan. But this is truly a Long War that already has been going on for 14 centuries; it is not likely to end in our lifetimes. Yet if we wish to bequeath to our children and grandchildren the free societies of equal opportunity and individual liberty that we all cherish, we must confront this enemy across the globe.

We must stand and fight for each and every place that he chooses to contest -- because if we don’t, those places will fall under Sharia and become bases like Afghanistan under the Taliban or the wild border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan today: places from which jihad will be waged against all of Dar al-Harb until it falls into Dar al-Islam.

The Battle for Mumbai is over for now. The Global War of Jihad goes on.


Ms. Lopez is the Vice President of the Intelligence Summit and a professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies.

Deepak Blames America

OPINION

The media look within to explain the sick delusions of the Mumbai killers.

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/
NOVEMBER 30, 2008, 11:53 P.M. ET


Deepak Chopra on Larry King Live

If the Mumbai terror assault seemed exceptional, and shocking in its targets, it was clear from the Thanksgiving Day reports that we weren't going to be deprived of the familiar, either. Namely, ruminations, hints, charges of American culpability that regularly accompany catastrophes of this kind.

Soon enough, there was Deepak Chopra, healer, New Age philosopher and digestion guru, advocate of aromatherapy and regular enemas, holding forth on CNN on the meaning of the attacks.

How the ebullient Dr. Chopra had come to be chosen as an authority on terror remains something of a mystery, though the answer may have something to do with his emergence in the recent presidential campaign as a thinker of advanced political views. Also commending him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that "If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules."

In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that "our policies, our foreign policies" had alienated the Muslim population, that we had "gone after the wrong people" and inflamed moderates. And "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay."

All this was a bit too much, evidently, for CNN interviewer Jonathan Mann, who interrupted to note that there were other things going on -- matters like the ongoing bitter Pakistan-India struggle over Kashmir -- which had caused so much terror and so much violence. "That's not Washington's fault," he pointed out.

Given an argument, the guest, ever a conciliator, agreed: The Mumbai catastrophe was not Washington's fault, it was everybody's fault. Which didn't prevent Dr. Chopra from returning soon to his central theme -- the grave offense posed to Muslims by the United States' war on terror, a point accompanied by consistent emphatic reminders that Muslims are the world's fastest growing population -- 25% of the globe's inhabitants -- and that the U.S. had better heed that fact. In Dr. Chopra's moral universe, numbers are apparently central. It's tempting to imagine his view of offenses against a much smaller sliver of the world's inhabitants -- not so offensive, perhaps?

Two subsequent interviews with Larry King brought much of the same -- a litany of suggestions about the role the U.S. had played in fueling assaults by Muslim terrorists, reminders of the numbers of Muslims in the world and their grievances. A faithful adherent of the root-causes theory of crime -- mass murder, in the case at hand -- Dr. Chopra pointed out, quite unnecessarily, that most of the terrorism in the world came from Muslims. It was mandatory, then, to address their grievances -- "humiliation," "poverty," "lack of education." The U.S., he recommended, should undertake a Marshall Plan for Muslims.

Nowhere in this citation of the root causes of Muslim terrorism was there any mention of Islamic fundamentalism -- the religious fanaticism that has sent fevered mobs rioting, burning and killing over alleged slights to the Quran or the prophet. Not to mention the countless others enlisted to blow themselves and others up in the name of God.

Nor did we hear, in these media meditations, any particular expression of sorrow from the New Delhi-born Dr. Chopra for the anguish of Mumbai's victims: a striking lack, no doubt unintentional, but not surprising, either. For advocates of the root-causes theory of crime, the central story is, ever, the sorrows and grievances of the perpetrators. For those prone to the belief that most eruptions of evil in the world can be traced to American influence and power there is only one subject of consequence.

Accustomed as we are by now to this view of the U.S., it's impossible not to marvel at its varied guises -- its capacity to emerge even in journalism ostensibly concerning the absurd beliefs about the 9/11 attacks held by so many Muslims. It's conventional wisdom in the region -- according to a New York Times dispatch from Cairo, Egypt, last fall by Michael Slackman -- that the U.S. and Israel had to have been involved in the planning, if not the actual execution of the assaults. No news there. Neither was the information that there was virtually universal belief in the area that Jews, tipped off, didn't go to work at the World Trade Center that day. Or that the U.S. had organized the plot in order to attack Arab Muslims and gain access to their oil.

The noteworthy point here was the writer's conclusion that the U.S. itself was to blame for the power of these beliefs. "It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre," Mr. Slackman allowed. But that would miss the point that the persistence of these ideas represents the "first failure in the fight against terrorism." A U.S. failure? Nowhere in the extended list of root causes here was there any mention of the fanaticism and sheer mindless gullibility that is the prerequisite for the holding of such beliefs.

Its very ordinariness speaks volumes about this report. A piece written with evident serenity, the perversity of its conclusions notwithstanding, it's one emblem among many of the adversarial view of the nation that is today entrenched in the culture. So unworthy is the U.S. -- an attitude solidly established in our media culture long before the war on terror -- that only it can be held responsible for the deranged fantasies cherished in large quarters of the Arab world. So natural does it feel, now, to hold such views that their expression has become second nature.

Which is how it happens also that the U.S. is linked to the bloodletting in Mumbai, with scarcely anyone batting an eye, and Larry King -- awash perhaps, in happy molecules -- thanking guest Dr. Chopra for his extraordinary enlightenment.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

When the Warmest in History Isn't

By Debra Saunders
The San Fransisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/
November 30, 2008

Here's another reason why people don't trust newspapers. When science reporters write about, say, hormone therapy or drinking red wine, they report on studies that find that hormones or red wine can be good for you, as well as studies that suggest otherwise. Any science involving complex organisms is rarely black and white.

When it comes to global warming, newspapers play up stories that reinforce the prevalent the-sky-is-falling belief that global warming is human-caused and catastrophic. But if a study or scientist does not portend the end of the world as we know it, it rarely rates as news.

In that spirit, many papers (including The Chronicle) have reported on a UC San Diego science historian who reviewed 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on global warming published between 1993 and 2003, and concluded, "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."

Over 10 years, not one study challenged the orthodoxy -- does that sound right to you? If that were true, it would strongly suggest that, despite conflicting evidence in this wide and changing world, no scientist dares challenge the politically correct position on the issue.

No wonder, David Bellamy -- an Australian botanist who was involved in some 400 TV productions, only to see his TV career go south after he questioned global warming orthodoxy -- wrote in The Australian last week, "It's not even science anymore; it's anti-science." Bellamy notes that official data show that "in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased." Exhibit B: Richard S. Lindzen, the MIT Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, recently wrote, "There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995."

Such findings rarely are reported, even as, Marc Morano, communications director for the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee told me, "Scientists keep coming out of the woodwork" to challenge the so-called consensus. "It's almost like a bandwagon effect."

The Global Warming Petition Project urges Washington to reject the Kyoto international global warming pact as there is "no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." So far, The Politico reports, more than 31,000 scientists have signed it.

The latest skirmish in the global warming war -- barely reported in America -- occurred after two bloggers found that the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies data wrongly cast this October as the warmest in recorded history. It turns out that the mistake was due to an error that wrongly tapped September temperature records from Russia. Christopher Booker of The Sunday Telegraph of London found the mistake "startling" in light of other contrary climate statistics, including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration findings of 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month.

In an e-mail, Goddard researcher Gavin Schmidt explained, "The incorrect analysis was online for less than 24 hours." (Thank bloggers Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist, and Canadian computer analyst Steve McIntyre for catching the mistake.) The error occurred because a report "had the wrong month label attached. There is quality control at NOAA and GISS but this particular problem had not been noticed before and the existing QC procedures didn't catch it. These have now been amended."

As for the snowfall records and low temperatures cited by Booker, Schmidt chalked them up to "cherry picking" data. He added, "Far more important are the long-term trends."

Now, honest mistakes happen -- even in high-powered, well-funded research facilities. Just last year -- again thanks to the vigilance of Watts and McIntyre -- Goddard had to reconfigure its findings and recognize 1934 -- not 1998, as it had figured -- as the hottest year on record in American history.

Alas, it is hard to see Goddard as objective when its director, James Hansen, testified in a London court in September in support of six eco-vandals. A jury then acquitted the six Greenpeace activists on charges of vandalizing a British coal-fired power plant based on the "lawful excuse" defense that their use of force would prevent greater damage to the environment after Hansen predicted the one Kingsnorth plant could push "400 species" into extinction.

Of course, he could be wrong.

dsaunders@sfchronicle.com

Florence, Then and Now

By ADAM BEGLEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
November 30, 2008


Tourists roll through the piazza near the Basilica di Santa Croce. The basilica plays an early part in “A Room With a View.”

HERE'S what you do first in Florence: Complain about the tourists. It's a time-honored tradition and there's no avoiding it — or them, as they squeeze down the narrow streets. They choke the majestic Piazza Signoria; they overwhelm the Uffizi Gallery — so go ahead and get the grumbling over with. Hordes of them! A year-round blight! Why can't they just stay home! Or, if you're like E. M. Forster's “clever” lady novelist in “A Room With a View,” the one who exclaims in dismay over the bovine “Britisher abroad,” admit that you'd like to administer an exam “and turn back every tourist who couldn't pass it.”

Snobbery is part of the sophisticated traveler's baggage — that hasn't changed at all in the 100 years since Forster, in his charming novel, skewered the supercilious “good taste” of those who look down on the “ill-bred people whom one does meet abroad.” Nowadays, when everyone in the ill-bred crowd is snapping photos of the Duomo with a cellphone, or swarming the Ponte Vecchio, plastic water bottle in hand, the urge to override touristic self-loathing by claiming for oneself a spurious superiority is pretty much irresistible; Forster, were he still around, would poke fun at that snobbish impulse with puckish glee. (But don't let that stop you from grousing about the sheer number of bodies blocking the view of the Arno.)

The next thing to do in Florence, according to Forster, is throw away your guidebook. Chapter II of “A Room With a View” is called “In Santa Croce With No Baedeker,” and it's a gently comic interlude every honest visitor to that great Franciscan basilica will recognize as a mocking portrait of himself. Or herself, in the case of our young heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, who winds up alone in the vast interior of Santa Croce without her “Handbook to Northern Italy.”

On the way in she noted “the black-and-white facade of surpassing ugliness” (the marble was added in the 19th century — paid for by an Englishman, by the way); now she's rattling around in the vast nave, wondering which of all the tombs was “the one that was really beautiful,” the one most praised by Ruskin. With no cultural authority to tell her what to think, she thinks for herself: “Of course it must be a wonderful building. But how like a barn! And how very cold!” And then, just like that, her mood changes: “the pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and, instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy.” We all want to be happy tourists, so here's the question: Is Forster's early 20th-century advice — toss the guidebook aside and let the pernicious Florentine charm seduce you — still viable early in the 21st?


Enjoying Florence can take endurance with the throngs of tourists invading its narrow streets. But if you ditch the guide book for "A Room With a View" by E. M. Forster, you'll find it easier to get along. Written a 100 years ago, this charming book reminds us that the Tuscan city is a capital of art, not just an overcrowded museum. Left, the skyline of Florence, dominated by the Duomo and Brunelleschi's dome.
Photo: Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times

ENJOYING “A Room With a View” is easy. A love story that begins and ends in Florence, with complications in England sandwiched in between, it's short, cheerful and delightfully sly. Besides, there are two excellent and generally faithful film adaptations, the classic 1986 Merchant-Ivory production starring Helena Bonham Carter and Daniel Day-Lewis and a PBS version released just this year with enticing shots of Florence and a weird, unwarranted twist at the end. Once Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson have kissed in a field of violets in the hills above the city (near Fiesole, about which more later), you know (spoiler alert) you're going to hear wedding bells at the end, no matter how many plot twists the crafty author engineers.

Enjoying Florence — a hard, forbidding city (“a city of endurance,” Mary McCarthy called it, “a city of stone”), handsome but not pretty, a challenge even if you could siphon off the tourists and replace them with picturesque Italians energetically engaged in producing local color — enjoying Florence takes more time and more effort. But if you have with you your copy of “A Room With a View,” you'll find it easier to get along. Forster's supple, forgiving irony, his ability to satirize lovingly, combined with his firm but regretful insistence on not confusing art and life, is exactly what you need if you plan to share this intensely urban town with tens of thousands of sightseers for the five or six days it will take you to do just like them and see the sights.

Forster reminds us that though Florence is a capital of art (is it ever!), it's not just an overcrowded museum. When Lucy leans out of her window in the Pensione Bertolini and gazes out across the Arno at the marble churches on the hill opposite, and watches with dreamy curiosity as the world trips by, the author notes approvingly, with his usual mild irony, “Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveler who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.” He's not suggesting that you ignore Giotto or the magnificence of the city's turbulent history, but that the hours spent soaking up the dazzling Florentine sunshine with no cultural agenda may be valuable after all.

When Forster himself first came to Florence in October of 1901, he stayed as Lucy did in a pensione on the Lungarno delle Grazie, with a view over the Arno to the Basilica di San Miniato al Monte and the dark hills beyond. He was on a grand tour, traveling with his mother, and was a dutiful sightseer. He wrote to a friend back home, “the orthodox Baedeker-bestarred Italy — which is all I have yet seen — delights me so much that I can well afford to leave Italian Italy for another time.” He was back the following year, at the same pensione, and by the time he'd finished “A Room With a View,” he'd struck a happy balance.


The Piazza della Signoria at twilight, where Lucy wanders one evening, unaccompanied. A fight breaks out and when she sees blood trickling out of the fatally wounded man's mouth, she swoons into the arms of a fellow traveler, George Emerson, as luck would have it.
Photo: Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times

In and around the Basilica di Santa Croce is everything that's delightful and appalling about Florence today. The neo-Gothic facade is still ugly, the long square in front of it dusty, bland, pigeon-infested and lousy with tourists. The interior is still cavernous, austere and chilly, impressive but somehow dispiriting. Even if you've ditched your guidebook, you're reminded at every step of the city's vast cultural riches: here are the tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo and Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose bronze baptistery doors opposite the Duomo were so perfect, according to Michelangelo, they could have been the gates of paradise; here are the memorials to Dante and Machiavelli. Crowds are waiting to get into the small, high-ceilinged chapels to the right of the high altar — that's where you can admire the tactile values of Giotto, whose early 14th-century frescoes grace the walls.
Just outside the basilica in the main cloister is the Pazzi Chapel, a perfectly proportioned Renaissance gem designed by the great Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi (who gave the Duomo its dome). The chapel, its white walls decorated with glazed terra-cotta medallions by Luca della Robbia (one of young Lucy's favorite artists), looks best when it's empty, filled to its noble height with nothing but chalky light from the lantern and the oculi in the dome. In other words, if a tour guide and his flock are in there, wait till they've gone.

The nature of those tours has changed dramatically since Forster's day. In 1901 — and until very recently, in fact — the tour guide pronounced on art and architecture in a booming or piercing voice, mostly in English but possibly also in German or French, while his flock huddled close to catch the echoing words of wisdom. In “A Room With a View,” Forster had fun with the solemn pronouncements of the Rev. Cuthbert Eager, who steered an “earnest congregation” around Santa Croce, lecturing all the while on the fervor of medievalism (“Observe how Giotto is ... untroubled by the snares of anatomy and perspective”). Today, technology has shushed the tour guide: he or she whispers into a microphone, which broadcasts the lecture soundlessly, piping the flow of factoids into the earphones of the audience, who can now stray a little (and there are more languages represented: Spanish, Greek, Polish, Russian). Some familiar props remain — the retractable antenna with a ribbon tied at the tip, a rallying sign for the group as it migrates from one artistic treasure to the next — but the new quiet is disconcerting, as though these clumps of tourists with headphones and wireless receivers hung around their necks were part of some sinister silent conspiracy.

IF you stroll a few dozen yards past the Pazzi Chapel, you'll find yourself in a second cloister, also designed by Brunelleschi, in 1446, the last year of his life. It's a place of great beauty and calm, usually deserted, and you don't need to know a thing about it to fall in love. The simple, elegant two-story cloister with its slender columns shelters you from the rigors and confusions of Florence and gives you instead the tranquil harmony of the Renaissance without pomp or grandeur, washed by bright Tuscan sun. I like to imagine, though Forster doesn't suggest it, that Lucy loitered here without her Baedeker, and that's why she began to be happy. At the very least, a quiet moment in the cloisters will give you strength to confront the multitudes and the immortal works of art remaining on your list.

And so will loitering over lunch. And dinner. One eats very well in Florence, and in general the simpler the restaurant, the better the food. If you can visit one church and one museum before lunch and one more church or another museum after lunch (whatever you do, don't miss the wealth of paintings piled higgledy-piggledy in the Palatine Gallery of the Palazzo Pitti), and then take a nap (Tuscan wine is cheap and abundant), and then stroll to dinner, perhaps along the Via de' Tornabuoni, under the looming, illuminated facades of great, stern palazzos, and stroll some more after dinner when the crowds have thinned and Florence seems gentler and the multicolor Duomo seems less garish but just as huge and astonishing — you'll find that after a few days of this routine, all your complaints will be forgotten, replaced with amazement and gratitude.


A tourist yields to the Tuscan sun. She may be one of Forster's travelers who remember "nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it."
Photo: Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times

Unless of course you stray into the Piazza Signoria, where the replica of Michelangelo's giant David attracts a sizable contingent of art lovers with camera phones night and day. This is where Lucy wanders one evening, unaccompanied:

“ ‘Nothing ever happens to me,' she reflected, as she entered the Piazza Signoria and looked nonchalantly at its marvels, now fairly familiar to her. The great square was in shadow; the sunshine had come too late to strike it. Neptune was already unsubstantial in the twilight, half god, half ghost, and his fountain plashed dreamily to the men and satyrs who idled together on its marge. The Loggia showed as the triple entrance of a cave, wherein dwelt many a deity, shadowy but immortal, looking forth upon the arrivals and departures of mankind. It was the hour of unreality — the hour, that is, when unfamiliar things are real. An older person at such an hour and in such a place might think that sufficient was happening to him, and rest content. Lucy desired more.”

And then something does happen to her: two Italians quarrel, one stabs the other in the chest, and Lucy, who sees the blood come trickling out of the fatally wounded man's mouth, swoons — into the arms of George Emerson, as luck would have it.

Nothing so dramatic is likely to occur to the 21st-century visitor. But if it does, head for Fiesole, the little hill town no more than a few miles from the Piazza Signoria. Along with the far reaches of the Boboli Gardens, this is the city's escape hatch, a chance to breathe deeply and see some greenery, plant life being notably absent from the historic center. Forster sends his contingent to Fiesole by horse and carriage (it's nearby that Lucy and George first kiss); now it's a 15-minute ride on a boxy orange municipal bus. But once you've arrived you realize that the chief virtue of this modest town, aside from the fresh air, is the panoramic view of the Arno Valley and the extraordinary, maddening city you've just left, its Duomo vast and proud even at this distance. And the wisdom of the structure of “A Room With a View” is suddenly as clear as the bright Tuscan sky: you will return to Florence, and next time it will be a honeymoon.


BEAUTY, STONES AND HANGING HAMS

GETTING THERE

There are no nonstop flights from New York to Florence. A number of airlines offer daily flights with connections through various European capitals; of those, the easiest is Alitalia, which offers several daily flights via Rome for about $650. The small Florence airport is only a few miles from the city; a bus service runs to the train station in the center of town and there are taxis, too. Once you have reached Florence, everything is within easy walking distance except Fiesole, which can be reached by taxi or bus.


Even if you've lost your guidebook, you're reminded at every step of the city's vast cultural riches: below, the bronze baptistery doors of Lorenzo Ghiberti.
Photo: Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times

WHERE TO STAY

If you are staying in the center of Florence, what you want is an oasis, and despite the tacky name, Hotel Monna Lisa (Borgo Pinti, 27; 39-055-2479751; http://www.hotelmonnalisaflorence.com/) provides exactly that. A converted 14th-century palazzo five minutes by foot from the Duomo, it's handsomely decorated and blessedly calm. A double room will currently cost you 125 euros ($160 at $1.28 to the euro).

If you must have a room with a view, go to Fiesole. Pensione Bencistà (Via Benedetto da Maiano, 4; 39-055-59163; http://www.bencista.com/) is shambolic and charming — and affordable, at about 185 euros for a double room with breakfast and dinner included.

Also in Fiesole is the Villa San Michele (Via Doccia, 4, Fiesole; 39-055-59451; http://www.villasanmichele.com/), which will bankrupt you — it's around 850 euros for a double room, but you will be coddled and cosseted in a gorgeous setting.

WHERE TO EAT

Meals are important in Florence, not just because the food is so good, but also because the rest of the time you're on your feet. Lunch for two, with wine of course, should cost you about 60 euros; dinner, with more wine, about 100 euros.

For lunch, especially Sunday lunch, Il Latini (Via de Palchetti, 6/r; 39-055-210916; http://www.illatini.com/) is a must. Don't bother with a menu (the waiters don't like to give them out, and anyway they know better than you what's good). Help yourself to the big bottle of red wine you'll find at your table. Admire the hundreds of hams hanging overhead. Eat!
Quiet, relatively tourist-free, pleasantly traditional and equally delicious is Del Fagioli (Corso Tintori, 47/r; 39-055-244285), just a few blocks from Santa Croce.

If you want a little atmosphere at night and you're willing to pay a premium for the buzz and the funky décor, try Trattoria Garga (Via del Moro, 48/r; 39-055-2398898; http://www.garga.it/).

And if you're in Fiesole at night and don't want to engage in the enforced sociability of the pensione, Trattoria i' Polpa (Piazza Mino, 21/22; 39-055-59485) is cozy and friendly and inexpensive.

WHAT TO READ

Fifty years after the publication of “A Room With a View,” E. M. Forster wrote a short essay in The New York Times Book Review called “A View Without a Room,” in which he speculated on the fate of the characters in his novel — not quite dessert, more like a tasty petit four. It has been printed as an afterward in the Penguin Modern Classics edition of “A Room With a View.”

P. N. Furbank's massive two-volume biography of Forster was first published three decades ago; now available in a one-volume Faber paperback, it's still the best account of a long, remarkable life.

If you want a critic's perspective on “A Room With a View,” see the chapter on it in Lionel Trilling's excellent “E. M. Forster: A Study,” first published in 1943 but available in paperback from New Directions.

ADAM BEGLEY is the books editor of The New York Observer.

Ivan and Boris Again

By Thomas Sowell
http://www.townhall.com/
November 26, 2008

There is an old Russian fable, with different versions in other countries, about two poor peasants, Ivan and Boris. The only difference between them was that Boris had a goat and Ivan didn't. One day, Ivan came upon a strange-looking lamp and, when he rubbed it, a genie appeared. She told him that she could grant him just one wish, but it could be anything in the world.

Ivan said, "I want Boris' goat to die."

Variations on this story in other countries suggest that this tells us something about human beings, not just Russians.

It may tell us something painful about many Americans today, when so many people are preoccupied with the pay of corporate CEOs. It is not that the corporate CEOs' pay affects them so much. If every oil company executive in America agreed to work for nothing, that would not be enough to lower the price of a gallon of gasoline by a dime. If every General Motors executive agreed to work for nothing, that would not lower the price of a Cadillac or a Chevrolet by one percent.

Too many people are like Ivan, who wanted Boris' goat to die.

It is not even that the average corporate CEO makes as much money as any number of professional athletes and entertainers. The average pay of a CEO of a corporation big enough to be included in the Standard & Poor's index is less than one-third of what Alex Rodriguez makes, about one-tenth of what Tiger Woods makes and less than one-thirtieth of what Oprah Winfrey makes.

But when has anyone ever accused athletes or entertainers of "greed"?

It is not the general public that singles out corporate CEOs for so much attention. Politicians and the media have focused on business leaders, and the public has been led along, like sheep.

The logic is simple: Demonize those whose place or power you plan to usurp.

Politicians who want the power to micro-manage business and the economy know that demonizing those who currently run businesses is the opening salvo in the battle to take over their roles.

There is no way that politicians can take over the roles of Alex Rodriguez, Tiger Woods or Oprah Winfrey. So they can make any amount of money they want and it doesn't matter politically.

Those who want more power have known for centuries that giving the people somebody to hate and fear is the key.

In 18th century France, promoting hatred of the aristocracy was the key to Robespierre's acquiring more dictatorial power than the aristocracy had ever had, and using that power to create a bigger bloodbath than anything under the old regime.

In the 20th century, it was both the czars and the capitalists in Russia who were made the targets of public hatred by the Communists on their road to power. That power created more havoc in the lives of more people than czars and capitalists ever had combined.

As in other countries and other times, today it is not just a question of which elites win out in a tug of war in America. It is the people at large who have the most at stake.

We have just seen one of the biggest free home demonstrations of what happens in an economy when politicians tell businesses what decisions to make.

For years, using the powers of the Community Reinvestment Act and other regulatory powers, along with threats of legal action if the loan approval rates varied from the population profile, politicians have pressured banks and other lending institutions into lending to people they would not lend to otherwise.

Yet, when all this blows up in our faces and the economy turns down, what is the answer? To have more economic decisions made by politicians, because they choose to say that "deregulation" is the cause of our problems.

Regardless of how much suffocating regulation may have been responsible for an economic debacle, politicians have learned that they can get away with it if they call it "deregulation."

No matter what happens, for politicians it is "heads I win and tails you lose." If we keep listening to the politicians and their media allies, we are all going to keep losing, big time. Keeping our attention focused on CEO pay-- Boris' goat-- is all part of this game. We are all goats if we fall for it.

The War Against Civilisation

By Melanie Phillips
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/
http://www.melaniephillips.com/
Sunday, 30th November 2008


Prashanth Vishwanathan for The New York Times

Police watched the Taj Mahal Hotel, set ablaze by terrorists, in Mumbai on Thursday.

The atrocities in Mumbai have left reporters and commentators floundering for explanations. Why India? Was this a local terrorist group or al Qaeda? Why single out Americans and Brits if they also targeted Indians in the railway station? Why attack some obscure Jewish organisation? And so on.

They are floundering because they still just don’t get it. The atrocities demonstrated with crystal clarity what the Islamist war is all about – and the western commentariat didn’t understand because it simply refuses to acknowledge, even now, what that war actually is. It does not arise from particular grievances. It is not rooted in ‘despair’ over Palestine. It is not a reaction to the war in Iraq. It is a war waged in the name of Islam against America, Britain, Hindus, Jews and all who refuse to submit to Islamic conquest.

The Mumbai atrocities told us very clearly a number of things.

The Islamists want to murder as many Americans, Brits, Hindus and Jews as possible. That is because they are waging all-out war against civilisation.

They singled out Americans, Brits and Indians in the financial heart of India to break the ever-more important strategic alliance between India and the west.

They went to some lengths in addition to single out a centre for observant Jews. Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife Rivka were murdered not because of Palestine but simply because they were Jews. That is because hatred of Jews as Jews is fundamental to the Islamists’ hatred of the west – and of Israel.

The Islamists showed a degree of organisation and co-ordination which are more akin to commando raids by an army than acts of terrorism.

They have the capacity not merely to commit mass murder but to cause mortal damage to a country’s economy.

If they can do this in Mumbai, they can do it in London or other British cities; the infrastructure of Islamist terror is more extensively developed in Britain, and the authorities more paralysed in the face of what they have allowed to grow in their midst, than anywhere else in the west.

And yet still the west is scratching its head...