Posts For: March 2, 2007

Franken’s Shtick

Robert Peach 03.02.2007 - 6:25 PM

The comedian Al Franken, author of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, recently announced that he is running for Senate from Minnesota, where he grew up. An alumnus of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, Franken made his name satirizing conservative figures like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and National Review’s Rich Lowry, whom he challenged to a fist fight in his garage.

His candidacy has been greeted with predictable enthusiasm. As Time gushed, “Enter the clown, who’s ready to play not Hamlet but Disraeli.” But is Franken really ready? Obviously, Americans have taken a political chance on ex-entertainers before, most notably with Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but Franken’s case poses special difficulties because his work has always been so harshly political and partisan.

Weekend Reading

Sam Munson 03.02.2007 - 2:59 PM

February 21, 2007 marked the centennial of the birth of W.H. Auden, one of the most important poets of the 20th century. Most widely known perhaps as the author of “September 1st, 1939″ and “Funeral Blues,” Auden remains unmatched as a formal virtuoso and as what might best be called a poet of civilization. Though many have tried, no one else has spoken in his distinctive double voice, endued at once with the full cultural authority of the English lyric tradition and with the highest erotic irony. To commemorate this occasion, we offer you Auden’s poem “Pleasure Island,” which first appeared in the pages of COMMENTARY in May 1949, and the Australian critic Clive James’s penetrating essay “Auden’s Achievement.” Enjoy.

Bush the Bookworm

Daniel Johnson 03.02.2007 - 1:45 PM

No myth about George W. Bush has been cultivated more sedulously by his enemies than the idea that he has never read anything—that he is too ignorant to be the leader of the West. Of course, the same myth was created about Reagan, but the Teflon president had the natural ebullience to remain indifferent and undamaged in public esteem. Bush is more vulnerable.

Yet the accusation is even less warranted in his case than it was in Reagan’s. Last Wednesday the British historian Andrew Roberts was a lunch guest at the White House. The President had already read Roberts’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900—a chunky volume of over 700 pages—over Christmas, months before it was published in the United States. (It had appeared in Britain last fall.) His first instinct was to arrange to meet the author, a long-standing habit of his.

Eliot A. Cohen to Join Rice at State

Sam Munson 03.02.2007 - 12:46 PM

As the Washington Post announced today, veteran COMMENTARY contributor Eliot A. Cohen has been hired by Condoleezza Rice as counselor at the State Department, a position previously occupied by figures like George F. Kennan and Helmut Sonnenfeldt. COMMENTARY is now hosting a slate of his articles, all available free of charge.

Not Quite Human

Yuval Levin 03.02.2007 - 11:44 AM

The stem-cell debate raging in the U.S. these last six years has hinged on a question of life and death—that is, whether destroying a human embryo should be permissible. But it is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ethical quandaries in the age of biotechnology. The kind of debates waiting for us just past the next turn will be far more subtle and complex, and directed to questions of human dignity as much as human life.

To get a hint of the mind-boggling issues to come, consider the debate over human-animal hybrids in Britain. Scientists in the UK have asked for government permission to use cloning techniques to produce a new entity that is almost entirely human, but not quite. In human cloning, a human egg is emptied of its nucleus, and in its place scientists insert the nucleus of another human adult cell (like a skin cell, for instance). The result is a developing embryo—a clone—with the genetic identity of the skin-cell donor, along with small amounts of DNA remaining from the egg donor.

America’s Favorite Buildings

Michael J. Lewis 03.02.2007 - 9:17 AM

The architecture of California, to the chagrin of the Los Angeles Times, is uninspiring. Or so one might conclude from a poll of America’s 150 favorite buildings, put together by the American Institute of Architects to mark its 150th anniversary. It shows that the country’s most beloved buildings are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Northeast, including the Empire State Building (1), the White House (2), the U.S. Capitol (6), the Chrysler Building (9), and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (10). In fact, of the top twenty, a full sixteen are in either New York or Washington, D.C. And California’s most impressive showing is not for a building at all but for an engineering marvel, the Golden Gate Bridge (5).

Of particular distress to the Times were the lackluster ratings given those much-acclaimed Los Angeles gems, the Getty Museum (95) and the Disney Concert Hall (99). The paper offers no explanation for these low rankings, but it may be on to something. How is it that the center of the entertainment industry, which creates the imagery that comprises American popular culture, has been so lackluster in creating memorable architecture? The relative newness of the West Coast is only a partial answer, since the public clearly feels deep affection for a recent monument like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (10).

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