CenterFeud

Garrison Keillor n'est pas bien impressé avec M. Lévy

Garrison Keillor, no red-stater but nonetheless an enthusiastic romanticist of small-town American life, reviews the latest book by French sociologist Benard-Henri Lévy, American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville for the New York Times Book Review and finds it to be superficial and off-the-mark:

Any American with a big urge to write a book explaining France to the French should read this book first, to get a sense of the hazards involved. Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book. It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a "partner-swapping club" in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair ("a festival of American kitsch"); Sun City ("gilded apartheid for the old");a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz - you get the idea. (For some reason he missed the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the adult video awards, the grave site of Warren G. Harding and the World's Largest Ball of Twine.) You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.

Although I have not read his book and therefore am not really qualified to comment, I had formed a similar impression of Lévy, after listening to him for five minutes being interviewed by John Stewart. He claims to be out to dispel the stereotypes of Americans for his French readers, but ends up reinforcing them at every turn. As a result, he comes off as either hypocritical or clueless about his subject, and doesn't do much to dispel American stereotypes of the French as arrogant, judgmental and elitist.

My own experience as regards France and its people is largely positive. True, I don't care for France's role on the global stage ("a moral compass has to have a butt end" as humorist P.J. O'Rourke observed), and most of us have had at least one or two experiences with snooty French waiters at one time or another, but at the grassroots level, I have had mostly positive experiences with everyday French citizens, who have hosted me in their homes and were gracious guests in mine.

I was hoping that Levy's excursion across this country would be more of an acknowledgement of that reality. And perhaps to some readers, it is just that. But it's telling that he can't even persuade Garrison Keillor to go along for the ride.

Pajamas Media's man in Beirut phones Hezbollah

Michael J. Totten has pulled up stakes and moved from Portland, Oregon to Beirut, where he will be reporting on Middle Eastern politics for the next six months. So what do you do when you're the new American journalist in town? Pick up the phone and call the Hezbollah press office, naturally.

Totten is just one of the impressive cadre of bloggers now affiliated with (the soon-to-be-renamed) Pajamas Media, the brainchild of Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson. To date contributors and editorial board members include notables such as La Shawn Barber, Dean Esmay, Michael Barone, David Corn, Eugene Volokh, Tammy Bruce, Cathy Seipp and Evan Coyne Maloney.

An amazing assemblage of firepower, bringing together some of the best talent of the blogosphere and the MSM. I expect them to create a new model of transparent journalism that will rewrite the rules and put their traditional counterparts to shame.

UPDATE: Michael's meeting went down just fine, since Hezbollah's press office is all about courting Western opinion. He promises to write more on the details down the road.

Picturing Beirut

Michael J. Totten continues to photoblog and videoblog from Lebanon on the upcoming elections there via Spirit of America, with additional updates on his own blog. Don't miss two recent posts that are not about politics per se but his impressions of the country: "Postcards from Lebanon" and "This is Beirut". It's the next best thing to being there.

Photo tour of a police state

Michael J. Totten is back from Libya and has posted a collection of photos that provides a fascinating and revealing glimpse of a closed society that most of us will, thankfully, never see. Don't miss it!

Additional commentary can be found here.

A world away

If you want to take a quick break from politics, Michael J. Totten is back from Tunisia and has posted a fine collection of exotic and breathtaking photos. Worth a look.

In the desert

Michael J. Totten blogs from Tunisia, and provides a haunting description of the desert south:

This is not the sand you know. Not the rim of pulverized granules of silicon and rock that ring the beaches of the world, nor the finely ground dirt of the Great Basin, the Mojave, or even the Chilean Atacama. This is liquefied earth. It swallows your feet. When the wind blows, your footprints last almost as long in shallow water. It forms into great rolling sand seas - ergs in Arabic – some that are bigger than France and where nothing lives.

The sand particles themselves are not like grains of sugar, but are the size and weight of dusty flour. That sand is everywhere. Between your molars and your toes. In your ears, your nose, in your bed, your shower, and your clothes. It pools in the corners of stairwells. Great tsunamis of it bury towns and villages whole until the wind turns fickle and uncovers them a hundred years later for tourists to marvel at on camel treks. You can climb a small dune and see shadows cast on sharply cut waves of orange toward the horizon, uninterrupted by house, tree, or rock. And to think: it goes on like that for hundreds of miles into Algeria. I don’t believe it, not really, not while looking at it. The mind reels. I need maps to see the truth of this place.

Read the whole thing.

Images of Stockholm and Amsterdam

Stockholm is a gracious and delightful city. Like most European cities, it's a showcase of centuries of history. I was last there in 1992, and have always wanted to go back. My wife recently returned from a conference there, and brought back some reminders just to rub it in.

This is how I remember Sweden - lush and green (obviously, I was there in August). This photo was taken at the University of Stockholm.

My wife visited in May. This picture was taken in City Center.

Here's City Hall...

Gamla Stan means "old town". It's a charming area with cobbled streets...

...and narrow walkways.

Here is the palace, complete with a very serious guard.

Yes, that is a sculpture of a hand reaching up out of the harbor. Who says the Swedes don't have a sense of humor?

And to round out the photo essay, a couple of shots from a layover in Amsterdam. Here's a view from one of the famed canal boats...

...and the central train station.