Tag Archives: United States

#42: Nomad

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“Islam is not just a belief; it is a way of life, a violent way of life. Islam is imbued with violence, and it encourages violence.”

These words were written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her memoir, Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations. Ali is an ex-Muslim, a Somalian-born intellectual who has also lived in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and, lastly, the Netherlands, before emigrating to the United States. Her bellicosity with regard to Islam has made her a marked woman, a status that is less figurative (her sharp rhetoric is a rarity in Western academia) than literal (she employs round-the-clock security as a result of death threats by fundamentalist Muslims).

Unlike most of her scholarly peers on both sides of the Atlantic, Ali has experienced firsthand the consequences of draconian Islamist laws, resulting punishments for non-adherence, and stringent sexual mores. As a woman, she also possesses an acute sense of the added burden imposed on her gender by radical Islam, a condition she unequivocally deems “the biggest obstacle to the integration and progress of Muslim communities in the West.” The daughter of verbally and physically abusive parents, sister of a violent brother, victim of genital mutilation, and escapee from an arranged marriage with a man whom she barely knew, Ali is uniquely positioned to editorialize on Islam, both its quotidian and extraordinary features, and the challenges it poses for modernized nations.

Why, then, has her critical reception been so muted? During interviews for positions with American think tanks, Ali’s interlocutors were “effusively polite, but…their support for me and my ideas was tentative;” one interviewer “seemed overly concerned with the possibility that I might offend Arab Muslims.” Prior to this, “when [she] began speaking out in Holland against genital mutilation…[she] was constantly told that immigrants to Europe knew that this practice was against the law in Europe, so it just didn’t happen to children once they got to Holland” (emphasis hers). New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, in an uncharacteristically fierce tone, wrote of Nomad: “Now Hirsi Ali is working on antagonizing even more people in yet another memoir,” and in a later paragraph, he followed this up with the truly appalling observation that “perhaps Hirsi Ali’s family is dysfunctional simply because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: ‘I love you.'” Ultimately, he patronizingly conceded that Ali would make “a terrific conversationalist at a dinner party.”

To be sure, Ali is not one to mince words. Nomad is dotted with unflattering portraits of Islam’s lesser-known practices; and her condemnations, stated without qualification, would evoke stammers and blushes among the well-bred liberal intelligentsia in her sphere. (Although she now works at the American Enterprise Institute, Ali expresses a nebulous wish “to alter [the status quo], radically” in an attempt to disabuse her detractors from branding her an American-style conservative.) “Can you be a Muslim and an American patriot?” she asks, in a chapter on American Muslims. “You can if you don’t care very much about being a Muslim.” Elsewhere, she berates the “closet Islamist” scholar Tariq Ramadan for his book, In the Footsteps of the Prophet, calling it “a badly written piece of proselytism” and claiming that “he doesn’t deserve the title of professor or a university chair from which to propagate his program of medieval brainwashing.”

Ali’s presence, then, in post-9/11 America comes at a uniquely discomfiting moment for political and religious scholars here. It is impossible to dismiss her outrage as right-wing demagoguery aimed at undermining the current political milieu in Washington; and yet, her no-holds-barred rhetoric on the subversive attributes of Muslim indoctrination feels wholly out of place in an arena largely populated by cautious (and occasionally self-loathing) multiculturalists. (For this last group she has no patience: “the culture of the Western Enlightenment is better,” she writes [emphasis hers].) What has emerged from the fallout, then, is a tacit buffer zone wedged by gun-shy scholars — what she terms “the emotional equivalent of patting my hand” — that leaves Ayaan Hirsi Ali out in the cold, defensive and smarting from a mild form of academic blacklisting.

Of course, Ali is not without her admirers. Paul Berman, in his indignant book The Flight of the Intellectuals, laments that “the campaign in the intellectual press against Hirsi Ali seems to me unprecedented — at least since the days when lonely dissident refugees from Stalin’s Soviet Union used to find themselves slandered in the Western pro-communist press.” Christopher Hitchens, likewise, has condemned her negative treatment in the Netherlands as “a supposedly liberal society collaborating in its own destruction.”

And yet these and other endorsements of Ali serve only to complicate her stature. Anti-Muslim hysteria has swirled relentlessly in recent months. The vitriolic debate over the “Ground Zero mosque” seems to have uncovered nearly a decade’s worth of barely concealed animosity among some conservatives towards adherents of Islam. During this same period, the standard liberal stance has been to dutifully emphasize the sheer minuteness of radicalism within the enormous sphere of global Islam. American attitudes toward Muslims appear to be approaching a watershed moment as both sides have steadily entrenched their positions. Where the left perceives bigotry, the right decries political correctness, which the left maintains is simply the protection of constitutional rights, which the right then argues must be understood in the context of a war on terror. Never have the bookends of the political spectrum been more repulsed by each other.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali stands somewhere in the rapidly vanishing middle ground. Despite her tumultuous journey out of Islam, she does not exhibit the utter forfeiture of rationality that plagues those with far less cause. Principal among this latter group are the ubiquitous talking heads, but also some pundits from traditionally more respected media outlets. In one particularly disturbing editorial last month, New Republic editor-in-chief Marty Peretz notably declared that “Muslim life is cheap” and added, “I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”

In contrast to the tactics employed by the most successful American shock jocks, Ali anchors her anti-Islamic message with the authority befitting one who speaks from experience. This does nothing to placate her leftist critics, who have all but fallen all over themselves acknowledging her personal fortitude while disavowing themselves of her conclusions. Armed with her impeccably authentic travails as an ex-Muslim woman, Ali embodies the ultimate headache for today’s Western liberal narrative, one in which cultural sensitivity is seen as an end unto itself.

However, while her presence causes complications among certain political factions, these unsympathetic commentators are not entirely self-serving either. In decrying Islamic tyranny, for example, Ali fails to acknowledge the relative successes of Turkey (99% Muslim), Indonesia (86% Muslim, and one of the world’s most populous democracies), and even Malaysia (60% Muslim). To lambaste a religion as the cause of many ills (in mostly smaller nations) while ignoring its more positive implementations (often in very large nations) is clearly not an oversight. It is a deliberate omission.

Ali’s shortsightedness compels her to ignore other encouraging signs of progress in the Muslim world as well. In a September 26 New York Times article titled “The Female Factor: A Path to Financial Equality in Malaysia,” Liz Gooch reports that “the number of female faces [in the Islamic finance sector] is multiplying.” One female Malaysian scholar noted that three-quarters of her university students are female. The author notes that “the roll call of female high achievers in this Southeast Asian nation cuts across almost all aspects of the [financial] sector.”

Perhaps the most aggravating aspect of Ali’s writing is her naivete in regards to both the West and the history of Christianity — which, despite her atheism, she sees as a force for good in the culture clash with Islam. In her frequent comparisons of the two faiths, it becomes increasingly obvious that Ali has sacrificed nuance for pathos. She continuously emphasizes the compatibility of Christianity with Enlightenment philosophy, and uses this marriage to illuminate the discordant relationship Islam shares with education and the sciences. Throughout her polemic, however, Ali fails to comprehend the parallels between contemporary events and religious history, and thus a possible road to a peaceful Islamic future: the ideological trajectory pioneered by Christianity centuries ago had its origins in an anti-intellectual era that very much resembles that of the Muslim world today. Just as the Christian faith has not always been as accepting as it is today (especially as depicted in Ali’s overly sympathetic portrayal), Islam has not always been, nor need always be, as insular and defensive as it is now.

In fact, Ali appears to observe this when she writes, “Christianity too once made a magical totem of female virginity. Girls were confined, deprived of education, married off as property. And yet Christian societies today are largely free of this habit of mind. Cultures shift, often very rapidly.” And yet somehow she is incapable of imagining the portability of this concept to another monotheistic religion. The result is a particularly deplorable quandary: the West has indeed found an authoritative voice that cuts between the dual extremism of the vitriolic right and the self-flagellating left. In other (perhaps less polarizing) times, this splitting of differences would be called a compromise. Here, it only adds to the confusion.

#38: A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb

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It wasn’t until the penultimate sentence of the final chapter that I was certain what Amitava Kumar’s latest book was trying to say. “Instead,” the author concludes, “the larger point is that the war on terror is obscuring from our sight the war in Iraq and its human cost.” Prior to this declaration, Kumar had expended 186 pages’ worth of explication, to varying degrees of success, without explicitly supporting any particular thesis.

A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, whose title is a play on an earlier work with a nearly identical title (Kumar turned “book” into “bomb”), looks very much like a supplementary reader in a cultural studies class and, in fact, reads similarly to what one would expect from such a niche role. That Kumar enticed me to keep reading long after I’d given up hope on discovering the book’s raison d’être entitles the author to a small measure of genuflection, if even a bit reluctantly.

Kumar’s reflections on the American response to the September 11 attacks center around two individuals: Hemant Lakhani, “a seventy-year-old tried for attempting to sell a fake missile to an FBI informant;” and Shahawar Matin Siraj, who the author believes was “baited by the New York Police Department into a conspiracy to bomb a subway.” Interspersed throughout are various vignettes devoted to artists and intellectuals whose visceral repulsion with an increasingly militant national anti-terrorism campaign was duly expressed in some truly inventive works of art. Among these is Hasan Elahi’s rigorous self-surveillance routine, in which he painstakingly logs every action he undertakes, ostensibly as evidence in the event of a government investigation — but on a larger scale, as a protest against that very same state-directed intervention.

Kumar’s failings, strangely enough, can be attributed to his fascination with this and other tangential narratives. It is not that they are irrelevant to a sober discussion of anti-terror initiatives; however, at times the author becomes so enamored of his subjects that he neglects to take a larger view. He lingers for some time on the questionable role of the government informant in the Lakhani case, recounting his many failings as a businessman as if to prove his lack of credibility via low credit score. And yet Kumar recoils when such circumstantial evidence is used to convict Lakhani, a man who was caught on tape proclaiming that “it will [expletive] their mother if one or two [planes are struck by bombs]…If it happens ten or fifteen places simultaneously at the same time…The people will be scared to death that how this could have happened.”

The problem with focusing so heavily on character is that the same technique Kumar uses to condemn the government’s methods in pursuing suspected conspirators is doubly as effective against the perceived victims of the state’s investigations. Clearly, as evidenced by American atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, serious crimes were committed in the name of justice. But Kumar’s valiant attempts to humanize the enemy notwithstanding, his defenses wither in the face of insurmountable evidence. Seemingly realizing this, Kumar mostly shies away from directly contradicting judicial verdicts; instead, he observes from his perch on the periphery, remarking on incongruity on the margins as the heavy hand of the state came crashing down with a vengeance.

Describing the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Kumar notes that “what saves me from the annihilating hatred, if only for a moment, is the voice of the terrorist at the other end [of the phone conversation, which was recorded]…He is more interested in describing to his superior the rooms that he says are large and lavish. It’s amazing, he says, the windows are huge here…Rightly or wrongly, I’m caught by the drama of the displaced provincial, the impoverished youth finding himself in the house of wealth.” This all makes for a tidy little novel, but reality is rarely so neatly synopsized. By dancing along the edges of the legal process, Kumar contributes little to the discussion of where the American response went wrong. This is an unfortunate consequence caused by a writer’s compassion; the result, then, is a scattered cacophony that leaves one unsatisfied with the hurried conclusion.

#37: Super Sad True Love Story

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There are many aspects of a book, aside from the text itself, that effectively preclude it from being taken seriously. It would seem that a title like Super Sad True Love Story falls squarely into this arena. Safe to say, in any case, that Gary Shteyngart is lucky to have been a known commodity before he burdened libraries and bookstores worldwide with his latest effort.

I say “burdened” not because the novel is so hard to read. If anything, the prose is easy on the eyes, and the brain. An average Shteyngartian observation is, “I just wanted to hold her. She was wearing an oatmeal sweatshirt, beneath which I could espy the twin straps of a bra she did not need.” This is actually a perfect microcosmic sentence in a way, since it also illustrates the author’s frustrating (and all-too-frequent) displays of paternalism. Time and again, Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old love-tortured protagonist, finds himself involuntarily expressing his infatuation with Eunice Park, his twenty-something muse, through a decidedly condescending lens. “A child, just a child,” he muses as he watches her shiver from alcoholic over-consumption. Elsewhere, Lenny makes an effort to convey this thought to Eunice: “Soon you will be home and in my arms and the world will reconfigure itself around you and there will be enough compassion for you to feel scared by how much I care for you.“

What say ye? Shteyngart is too self-aware as a writer to commit to such indulgent (not to mention italicized) sentences without at least the light sauté of irony thrown in. This is a man who casually remarks that “Dr. Park was landing the plane of his soliloquy,” or that “I prepared myself to become Chekhov’s ugly merchant Laptev again.” Shteyngart’s transparent ease with language renders his patriarchal episodes all the more confusing, and I’m not persuaded this ambiguity benefits anyone.

As the critical praise splotched onto the book’s back cover makes abundantly clear, Super Sad True Love Story is a satire — of contemporary American culture, our youth-obsessed society, and the vapidity of unchecked materialism. I usually stumble over faux-prophetical gazes into the future, precisely because these hypothetical apocalypses nearly always go too far. So hypnotized are many authors, by the creative license afforded them by the fiction/sci-fi genre, that they fail to pump the brakes on the less accessible elements of their vivid imaginations.

Nevertheless, in this particular case, resistance, as they say, was futile. Shteyngart’s American dystopia is littered with such head-scratchers as Credit Poles (containing “little LED counters at eye level that registered your Credit ranking as you walked by”), Onionskins (entirely see-through jeans worn by fashionable women), and the ubiquitous äppäräti, high-tech portable devices that seem to straddle the line between a camcorder and the iPhone. And yet, the ugly shades of gray that comprise Lenny Abramov’s values-depraved universe remain strikingly, even maddeningly, believable. Chalk it up to Shteyngart’s installment of the Chinese as the ascending global hegemon, or perhaps the futile American war in Venezuela that practically begs for the reference to our contemporary military expeditions in the Middle East. Whatever the reasons, the depressing world of Super Sad True Love Story retains more than enough real-life potentiality to prevent itself from being dismissed out of hand. Whether this is sufficient for it to be included in the pantheon of classic contemporary literature may, however, require a slightly further suspension of disbelief.

#20: Rise to Globalism

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Last month, The New Yorker ran a full-page piece on Stephen E. Ambrose, American historian extraordinaire and author, most famously, of Band of Brothers. (Yes, that one.) Ambrose, whom the reporter describes (not inaccurately) as “America’s most famous and popular historian,” appears to have joined the long list of respected writers and academics whose zeal for sculpting a superior narrative was undermined by the dubious methods they used along the way. As Dwight D. Eisenhower’s biographer, Ambrose, who died in 2002, took pride in the “hundreds and hundreds of hours” he spent with the president over the course of five years.

As it turns out, these hours turned out to be just as phantasmal as, say, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or an honest politician. According to The New Yorker article, the deputy director of Eisenhower’s presidential library and museum recently discovered the president’s schedule, which revealed that “Eisenhower saw Ambrose only three times, for a total of less than five hours. The two men were never alone together.” In an understatement, the deputy secretary mused, “[Eisenhower] simply didn’t see that much of Stephen Ambrose.”

Notwithstanding the historian’s posthumous humiliation, it is quite clear just how he ascended to the zenith of American history-telling. In the 1997 eighth revised edition of Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, Ambrose joined with Douglas G. Brinkley (ironically, the Stephen E. Ambrose Professor of History at the University of New Orleans at the time) in recounting the events, decisions, and people that shaped the course of the twentieth century and set the standard for the one following.

Reading a pre-9/11 history book feels a bit fantastical at times, as when the introduction to the book presciently concludes, “America in the 1990s was richer and more powerful — and more vulnerable — than at any other time in her history.” In general, however, Rise to Globalism is every bit the thorough (although not detached) retrospective one would expect from a titan in the field such as Stephen Ambrose. Somewhat surprisingly, the most interesting nuggets are not the minutiae of political decision-making or military strategies but Brinkley and Ambrose’s perspectives on them.

As one clear example, it is quite obvious from the outset of chapter fifteen, Reagan and the Evil Empire, that the authors are not particularly fond of President #40. This is made abundantly clear in recounting the American involvement in the Israeli-Lebanese war in the early 1980s. Whether describing Reagan as “[blundering] in Lebanon as badly as Carter had blundered in Iran” or claiming that “no one, most of all Reagan himself, ever seemed to be clear on the purpose of that involvement,” Rise to Globalism is unapologetically ambivalent at best about the Reagan administration.

Of course, this is a perfectly valid evaluation, and one that helpfully reminds the reader that a history textbook this is not. (Of course, recent developments in the Texas public school curriculum raise doubts as to whether some history textbooks are even history textbooks. But I digress.) The authors’ perspectives are not partisan, it should be noted; of President Jimmy Carter, they praise his emphasis on human rights, which “struck a responsive chord among the oppressed everywhere,” but ultimately concede that “all the goals were wildly impractical and none were achieved.”

Especially fascinating is the nuanced tale of the Vietnam War, in which the reader is taken beyond soldiers, fighting, politicians, and election campaigns and into a deeper look at the underlying shifts in national societies themselves. Of course, these changes cannot be understood in isolation, and Ambrose and Brinkley deftly portray the interacting elements of politics and public sentiment. (The American fascination with the atomic bomb’s potential to establish permanent world hegemony is but one of several intriguing developments explored within this context.)

At times, Rise to Globalism is unforgiving in its assessments of American arrogance and impulsiveness, a tendency that lends credibility to their praise at other moments. (Commenting on the American commitment to Vietnam, despite elected officials’ many reassurances that the United States was not “fighting a white man’s war against Asians,” the authors ponder, “Why had the Americans not heeded their own warnings? Because they were cocky, overconfident, sure of themselves, certain that they could win at a bearable cost, and that in the process they would turn back the Communist tide in Asia.”) A similar attention to detail is displayed in coverage of the Cold War; perhaps most remarkable is the illuminating fact that, strenuous attempts at differentiation notwithstanding, most American presidents of the era closely mimicked their immediate predecessors’ foreign policies.

Despite having been written in the late 1990s, at a time when American influence could hardly have been more pervasive, Rise to Globalism is remarkably circumspect in its prognostications for the future. The book ends as President Bill Clinton’s second term begins, a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity for the West; and yet, in the last sentence, the authors caution that “no one would claim that he had wrought a global utopia of free-market democracies.” If Stephen Ambrose were alive today, a sequel, or at least an updated edition, would be in order. The times, they are a-changin’, but Rise to Globalism‘s relative old age has yet to relegate it to the dusty side of the bookshelf.

#19: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

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Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist takes an interesting approach to storytelling. The narrator is a Pakistani man sitting in a Lahore cafe, and from the outset it becomes clear that the narrative will move and flow only at his bidding. Ostensibly, his audience is the “uneasy American stranger” seated across from him, who manages to jump or look alarmed at virtually everything, but his book-long monologue makes it abundantly clear that the reader is the host’s true target.

“Do not be frightened by my beard,” the Pakistani, whose name is Changez, reassures his guest. “I am a lover of America.” And with that, Changez launches into an account of his life and times in the United States, beginning with his undergraduate years at Princeton University and soon followed by his interview and eventual employment at a valuation firm, Underwood Samson. Inevitably, a romantic entanglement materializes, as Changez’s new employer competes for his attention against Erica, the type of girl who wore “a short T-shirt bearing the image of Chairman Mao” as if it had personal meaning.

Changez finds himself gaining headway into American corporate culture; meanwhile, his relationship with Erica runs a parallel course. The only hitch, it seems, is her inability to release herself from the memory of her old boyfriend, Chris, who had died of cancer the year before she met Changez. On some level the latter man feels vulnerable, threatened even, at his seemingly disadvantageous position, but with a sense of irony at feeling jealous of a dead man.

Then, as often happens in recent literature, came September 11. Changez, on assignment in Manila for Underwood Samson, was in his hotel room preparing to return to the States when he saw the news on television. “I stared as one — and then the other — of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled.” Changez’s instinctual pleasure was not, he assures his listener, in response to the violent act itself but as an acknowledgment of what it symbolized, “the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees.” Fearing what such a reaction might provoke in his colleagues, he wisely keeps this sentiment to himself.

As the story progresses, however, the disparity between Changez’s corporate breeding and his national and cultural identity grows ever larger. Erica, afflicted with anxiety and depression following the attacks in New York, withdraws for long periods; each time he sees her, she has shrunk to a fraction of the person he had seen the time before. His conflicted relationship with her mirrors his increasingly frayed connection to the United States, as perceived American self-righteousness and machismo soon supersede concerns for maintaining some semblance of the existing (and precarious) global order, a development that holds dubious implications for Changez’s native Pakistan. “It will perhaps be odd for you,” he tells his guest, “…to imagine residing within commuting distance of a million or so hostile troops who could, at any moment, attempt a full-scale invasion.”

Towards the end of his story, Changez describes an emotional farewell with Erica, which immediately follows her verbal longing for her deceased lover. As Changez prepares to leave her, “she gave me a hug and afterwards she stood there, looking at me. But he is dead, I wanted to shout!” To Changez, the statement is an equally appropriate analysis of American innocence. Nostalgia for a mystic past is hardly empathetic when one exerts such overwhelming control over the present. “I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward,” Changez muses. Following September 11, “for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back.” His attempts to ingratiate himself into Erica’s life met resistance from the same impulse that denied his easy assimilation into American culture.

These sentiments, while hardly original, are easily comprehensible and are expressed in an enjoyable format to boot. Thus it is all the more disappointing when the narrator descends into the occasional, yet dispiriting, cliche. Upon returning to the States from an aborted assignment in Chile, for example, Changez suddenly sees his destination in a new light. “…I was struck by how traditional your empire appeared. Armed sentries manned the check post at which I sought entry…once admitted I hired a charioteer who belonged to a serf class lacking the requisite permissions to abide legally and forced therefore to accept work at lower pay; I myself was a form of indentured servant whose right to remain was dependent upon the continued benevolence of my employer.” Melodrama aside, it is difficult to ascertain exactly how these disjointed fragments coalesce with the rest of the narrative.

This is the most egregious of Hamid’s errors, an admittedly minor one in the spectrum of literary flaws, but one that, nonetheless, could just as easily have been uttered by Michael Moore as penned by a serious author. Ultimately, Mohsin Hamid is exactly that; now, if only the filmmaker could take a few notes from him.

#14: The Post-American World

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Fareed Zakaria is a very reasonable man. In this sense, the contrast between him and the rest of mainstream American punditry is stark indeed. Coming from anyone else, a book with the title The Post-American World could plausibly entail an exercise in sensationalist doomsday forecasts; from Zakaria, we know that such is not the case. Some conservatives and patriots may disagree with the book’s contents, but it is impossible to dismiss as a self-loathing work of anti-nationalism.

Zakaria has the distinct privilege of combining his position of respect and influence within the court of American public opinion with the nuanced perspectives he has gained from his initial outsider status. In 1982, the author was an eighteen year-old Indian student on a flight to the United States, about to embark on a four-year educational journey in a country where he would eventually settle. “The preceding decade had been a rough one in India,” writes Zakaria, “marked by mass protests, riots, secessionist movements, insurgencies, and the suspension of democracy.”

But something has happened since then — in India, in China, and in many other nations as well. Zakaria calls this something “the rise of the rest,” as “countries all over the world have been experiencing rates of economic growth that were once unthinkable.” Unsurprisingly, given the title of his book, Zakaria is not merely interested in this economic phenomenon as a historical anomaly, but also as an indication of America’s rapidly changing role in the new era. In this, our twenty-first century edition of a brave new world, “the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. That does not mean we are entering an anti-American world. But we are moving into a post-American world [emphasis in original], one defined and directed from many places and by many people.”

Instead of wallowing in national self-depression, however, Zakaria welcomes this new period. He notes that the American share of global GDP has remained relatively constant for decades; and he elucidates the truths hidden behind the alarmist (and often misunderstood) statistics about American decline. But while Zakaria’s prognostications leave plenty of space for a bright future, his is not a utopian vision unencumbered by hard facts. (One notable exception is his diagnosis of the American economy: “The economic dysfunctions in America today are real, but, by and large, they are not the product of deep inefficiencies within the American economy.” The first edition of his book was printed in April 2008, just months before the economy bottomed out; a later paperback edition included a new preface predicting that “the current economic upheaval will only hasten the move to a post-American world.”) Indeed, Zakaria levels criticisms in a variety of areas, decrying the United States’ “highly dysfunctional politics,” acknowledging that “the American school system is in crisis,” and dubbing the nation an “enfeebled” superpower. In his final chapter, “American Purpose,” Zakaria asks, “How did the United States blow it? [It] has had an extraordinary hand to play in global politics…Yet, by almost any measure…Washington has played this hand badly. America has had a period of unparalleled influence. What does it have to show for it?”

That is a question whose answer will depend on the person, but Zakaria’s prescription for American healing, while hardly groundbreaking, is based in historical precedent: more multilateralism. Contrary to some who argue that idealism is always the refuge of lesser nations while realpolitik is embraced by hegemons, Zakaria points out that the United States “was the dominant power at the end of World War II, when it founded the United Nations, created the Bretton Woods system of international economic cooperation, and launched the world’s key international organizations. America had the world at its feet, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman chose not to create an American imperium.”

Interestingly, Zakaria’s ideas have found traction in the administration of President Barack Obama. The results are mixed: Obama’s extended hand to Iran was met with a clenched fist and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been left largely unaffected, but Obama was able to broker a deal between the heads of the Chinese and French states at the G-20 summit, and the United States and Russia recently finalized a nuclear arms reduction deal. It remains to be seen exactly what will follow from the American presidency’s renewed emphasis on diplomacy, but early returns indicate some potential for positive results. We may live in a post-American world, but if Fareed Zakaria has any say in the theater of global politics, the United States will be far from playing a bit role.

#13: The Informers

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The Informers is a case study of words: words uttered carelessly, meaningfully, traitorously. It concerns itself with not only the interpretations, but also the appropriateness, of these words, of rhetoric itself, and in so doing questions the way we write and understand histories.

Yes, histories. What Juan Gabriel Vásquez has constructed is a web of intermingling stories, centered on the World War II era and thereafter in Colombia. These narratives alternatively corroborate and contradict; even in recounting the same events, one’s telling is always somewhat different from another’s. Calling on historical orators — from Demosthenes to Jorge Eliécer Gaitán — the author draws attention to the lasting and powerful effects of speech and memory on the lives of those who have spoken and heard.

On the surface, The Informers is the tale of Gabriel Santoro, the son and namesake of a venerated Colombian rhetorician, and his stubborn attempt to recapture and reassemble the missing pieces — the deliberate omissions and deceptions — from his late father’s life. Much of Gabriel’s (the father’s) story is related by a lifelong friend: Sara Guterman, a Jewish German emigré whose father was among the lucky few of his compatriots to successfully invent a new life in Colombia, was instrumental in helping Gabriel (the son) put together the various components that comprised his father’s life.

What is reality to one is fiction to another, however, and it is soon apparent that the son understood very little of the truth of his father’s past. Deep in the throes of an apparently life-ending illness, the senior Santoro tells his son, “Memory isn’t public, Gabriel.” This proclamation is indirectly the result of the dying man’s scathing review of his son’s book, A Life in Exile, which chronicled the life story of Sara Guterman and the struggle of German immigrants to find acceptance in a Colombia beset with war-heightened xenophobia.

The son, however, feels differently than his father on the subject of remembering. Meanwhile, Sara remains almost indecipherable, seemingly ambivalent at times, suspended as she is between the imperative to record a tragedy for posterity and the loyalty she feels to a lifelong friend. What is left in the end is Gabriel the younger’s version of events, a retelling of past cowardice that suggests a personal betrayal of its own. The Informers is neither a political nor a journalistic endeavor, but the ideas within resonate in both arenas, as Vásquez masterfully shoves the public and private spheres into an uncomfortably small space. The result is an unsettling, and highly relevant, set of difficult questions. In an era of unprecedented media ubiquity and the much-ballyhooed shrinking of personal privacy, The Informers provides no easy answers, but at least it has done us the service of starting a necessary conversation.

#10: Notes from the Cracked Ceiling

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Anne E. Kornblut, a White House reporter for the Washington Post, is impatient to see a woman in the White House — and not another First Lady, either. Her book, Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and What It Will Take for a Woman to Win, is easy (yet purposeful) reading. But lest her novelistic tone deceive you, let it be clear that her views on the necessity of recruiting more female political candidates are never in question. Having personally followed the two aforementioned presidential hopefuls during their campaigns, Kornblut has seen firsthand the unique abuse lavished upon female candidates. In her introduction, she argues that Clinton and Palin “may not have lost because they were women…but their sex played an outsize role in the year’s events.” She then closes that section with the observation that “the glass ceiling may be cracked…but it is far from broken.”

What, then, is keeping women from breaking through that glass? History is an obvious culprit, but Kornblut is disinclined to let the present off the hook so easily. More specifically, she faults the candidates and their large teams of handlers, who often waged behind-the-scenes battles over their candidates’ public self-portrayal. Should Hillary exude toughness, or feminine restraint? How about a combination of the two? Would it help if her daughter, Chelsea, campaigned along with her? In one potent example of poor decision-making, Kornblut details the various Christmas commercials the presidential candidates aired in December 2007. While Obama focused on his home and family, Clinton devoted her airtime to wrapping Christmas presents with labels such as “universal health care” and “bring troops home.” “It was hard,” Kornblut wryly notes, “to quit being tough.”

Of course, Hillary Clinton eventually lost the Democratic nomination, but not without some help from the national media. Was their constant bombardment indicative of sexism, or simply a reaction to the Clinton camp’s preexisting ambivalence towards the press corps? Kornblut seems to think there is some of both, but the mass public’s embrace of some of the more vicious ad hominem attacks on Clinton lend credence to allegations that it was more the former than the latter.

Clinton’s demise was soon overshadowed by the meteoric rise of Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska. Kornblut does an admirable job retracing Palin’s time on the campaign trail, especially in noting how quickly the high praise was overtaken by vitriolic condemnation. And while it is true that public commentary on Palin soon reflected sexist undertones, Kornblut at times seems unable to completely separate these attacks from the legitimate criticisms, most prominent of which was Palin’s lack of a grasp on even basic domestic and foreign policy issues and her disastrous performances in network interviews. That Palin became a favorite target of the Democratic base was undeniable, but that this was largely due to her gender is much less apparent.

Furthermore, Kornblut missed a golden opportunity to delve deeper into one of the more fascinating subplots of Palin’s candidacy — namely, that of her role within the historical feminist movement. Traditionally, feminists were assumed to adhere to more liberal ideology, which in its most common incarnation usually included a pro-choice stance and a general alignment with the Democratic Party. So when Palin, a mother of five with strong pro-life views, became the vice presidential nominee, it seemed almost as if the modern feminist movement had reached a fork in the road. Kornblut had noted earlier how many women in their twenties had voted for Obama over Clinton in the Democratic primaries, confident in their belief that voting based on competence and ideology over gender politics epitomized a more authentic form of gender equality. With Palin, older models of feminism were once again being strained: was Palin’s candidacy, given her conservative views (especially on abortion), a betrayal of feminist ideals, or was it reflective of a new wave of female ascendancy representing all points on the political spectrum?

Kornblut gives this tension a brief nod when she notes that “if Clinton had epitomized the feminist movement’s dream, Palin was in many ways its worst nightmare.” Entire volumes could be written on this subject, and in that Kornblut’s book was ostensibly intended to ask these and similar questions, the fact that she devoted just several pages to Palin’s role within feminism was disappointing. Similarly glaring in its absence was any discussion of female minority voters who faced the difficult and historic choice between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primaries. The question of which identity holds strongest — race or gender — was ignored in Kornblut’s analysis, a surprising omission in an election for which identity took center stage.

Towards the end of the book, Kornblut contrasts the American political experience for women with that of other countries. The comparison is not flattering to the United States. For Kornblut, however, the upside to the disappointment of two women narrowly losing out in the 2008 elections is that countless lessons can be taken from their failures — shortcomings that were as much the fault of their advisers, the media, and an unpredictable electorate as they were of the candidates themselves. With shrewd recruitment and well-planned campaigns, women will continue to challenge the gender status quo in politics. It remains to be seen when this will happen, but the shattering of the glass ceiling is long overdue.