John Bolton’s War
This Week: Only the Mustache Knows— with Paul Pillar, Huss Banai, Adil Najam, Derek Davison, and Matt Duss. Listen today at 2pm or anytime on our website.
If you missed the Iraq War movie, there’s a sequel playing this spring with Iranian subtitles: Bolton’s War. John Bolton gets the starring role, this time, after his cameo in the original.
In Netflix speak: if you like movies with nationalist neocons; if you’re partial to regime change; if you like boots on the ground in ancient Middle Eastern capitals; or if you like escapist, fantasy horror flicks, this one is for you.
We can only hope it’s a fantasy movie, the rare kind of mindless madness that Donald Trump might actually dispell, thanks to his avowedly non-interventionist instincts.
Our guests were a solid chorus of good sense and restraint; this was a terrific show you won’t hear anyplace else, alas. Ex spook Paul Pillar reads the beltway tea leaves; Derek Davison reads the media (and gets off a great line, calling The New York Times the newspaper of wreckage); scholar Huss Banai reads the Iranians; Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’ fopo expert, reads the Dems (interesting young guy; read this profile), and wise man Adil Najam reads the globe.
We’re Reading: “Our Man” by George Packer
Make that devouring. We can’t put down George Packer’s biography of Richard Holbrooke, the warts and all all profile of a guy who’s been part of the national security establishment in Washington and in war zones everywhere for 50 years, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, and whose life seems to explain it all. Packer holds nothing back about Holbrooke’s insatiable ambition and the dirty details of who and what he sacrificed to claw himself up the fopo career ladder — marriages, relationships, life-long friendships, kids. One reviewer called Packer’s style “cruel precison.” Lydon says it’s “sickeningly interesting.” We’re planning a show with George Packer in the next couple of weeks.
Next Week: Pico Iyer
We spent a delightful afternoon with Pico Iyer last Friday talking about Japan. He’s written a memoir about his life in the suburbs of Kyoto, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells and a book out in September called A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations, which is a kind of memoir told in aphorisms. They’re both great.
Spring has sprung according to our photographer friend Michael Lutch.
That’s it for me, I’m moving this weekend and channeling E.B. White:
Every morning, when I left for work, I would take something in my hand and walk off with it, deposit in the big municipal wire trash basket at the corner of Third, on the theory that the physical act of disposal was the real key to the problem.. A man could walk away for a thousand mornings carrying something with him to the corner and there would still be a home full of stuff. It is not possible to keep abreast of the normal tides of acquisition. A home is like a reservoir equipped with a check valve: the valve permits influx but prevents outflow. Acquisition goes on night and day — smoothly, subtly, imperceptibly. I have no sharp taste for acquiring things, but it is not necessary to desire things in order to acquire them. Goods and chattels seek a man out; they find him even though his guard is up. Books and oddities arrive in the mail. Gifts arrive on anniversaries and fete days. Veterans send ballpoint pens. Banks send memo books. If you happen to be a writer, readers send whatever may be cluttering up their own lives; I had a man once send me a chip of wood that showed the marks of a beaver’s teeth. Someone dies, and a little trickle of indestructible keepsakes appears, to swell the floor. This steady influx is not counterbalanced by any comparable outgo. Under ordinary circumstances, the only stuff that leaves a home is paper trash and garbage; everything else stays on and digs in.
And here’s Adam Colman, our new producer:
I finally started reading Joan Didion’s essays more closely. Most recently, I read “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38,” which you can find in Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
The essay’s about Howard Hughes, and it starts this way:
Seven thousand Romaine Street is in that part of Los Angeles familiar to admirers of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett: the underside of Hollywood, south of Sunset Boulevard, a middle-class slum of “model studios” and warehouses and two-family bungalows.
That’s a milieu well known to filmgoers as well as readers; it’s a soothing cliché at this point. But Didion keeps meditating upon the grim aspect of Hollywood dreaminess, until, by the essay’s end, she’s focused on a troubling dimension of our loftiest dreams—beliefs, ideals, values. What we really value, the essay proposes, are chaotically antisocial qualities.
Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.
I’m not sure if this is completely true. But Didion brings you to that pronouncement so directly, introduces the problem so lucidly, that it stays in your mind long after reading. Whether the pronouncement is accurate or not, it’s probably useful to confront it. Or, I hope it is.
This Week’s Ephemeral Library
Make podsense of things with our friends at n+1, who also cite our role as the first podcasters. What’s Steve Pinker doing posing for an ad for (Freudian) loafers? There’s still time—only a few days!—to see Huma Bhaba’s simultaneously worldly and otherworldly exhibit, “They Live,” at the ICA. Open Source’s ever-inventive illustrator, Susan Coyne, has created a Patreon for her comics, drawings, and illustrations. Collect ’em all!
Remember I.M. Pei, who helped shape Boston and so much more. Thanks for sending along those great photos, Michael!
Til next week!
The OS gang.
