by Claire Chambers

Much has been written about Boris Johnson as a politician in recent weeks. But Johnson is also an author of fiction, verse (I won't dignify it by using the word 'poetry'), and journalism. As such, another way of understanding the man's worldview is to scrutinize his imaginative work. I examine Johnson's ​little-known ​comic novel Seventy-Two Virgins (2004), which centres on the attempt by an Islamist cell to attack Westminster Hall during a visit from an unnamed American president.

In this blog post I consider the book's inescapable Islamophobia​, and the light this sheds on Johnson, ​figurehead of the Brexit campaign​. Such Islamophobia is particularly concerning in the context of the post-referendum ​British ​upsurge in xenophobia​, racism​, and religious hatred​.

Seventy-Two Virgins is an unpleasant and unfunny book which has a simile and a stereotype problem. Johnson's similes are usually clunky and sometimes offensive. Early on in the novel, he describes ​West London as being 'spread out … in the morning sun, like a beautiful woman surprised in bed without her make-up'. Not only does this reveal Johnson's patronizing view of women, about which more shortly, but also the image's derivation − unwitting or otherwise − from T. S. Eliot's superior lines, 'the evening is spread out against the sky. | Like a patient etherized upon a table', does no favours to either text. Much later, clapping from the audience in Westminster Palace is compared to 'the spastic batting of a butterfly's wings as it dies against a window'. Here Johnson's verbiage and the imprecision of his image flutter against his outdated and ableist use of the word 'spastic'.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

They say that this year the monsoon will hit the Indian subcontinent hard and strong. They say that we who have been parched by the sun six months and some long, will now cower from the rains, for the next few, and then some. They say that climate change is real. And that we have made it so. That we shall reap what we sow, which is, in this case, the opening out of the heavens, in the kind of bounty that one neither wants nor can handle. The monsoon in this part of the world, that creature of romantic songs, and tea by the window, is a capricious creature of munificent gifts and unbearable fury. Not six months ago, I wrote about a city suffering the monsoon and its unreasonable gifts, brought to its knees by the usual combination of bureaucratic surprise and political willfulness.

And yet, the many years that I was away from these tropical parts, I missed the monsoon. And the fragrance of the first rains. The rains smell, like all writers attempting a description of smell will tell you, like nothing that you may have smelt if you haven't smelt the rain. Its closest description can only be brought about through invocation. Invoke if you will, a morning of semi-darkness, one where the previous night has been spent in heavy argumentation with people you love, where food and drink have flown in equal measure, where one has said things that sound right and ring true, and where sleep has brought dreams of the kind one wishes to remember, but can't. As you emerge from this dream-filled, accomplished stupor, something of the nature of memory winds through your nostrils, and you remember every moment of every happy day that you may have ever lived. Your limbs feel supple, and your mind light, and your body feels one with the bodies of leaves, and tree trunks, and branches, and flowers. And you know that it has rained. Such is the potency of this smell that people have even tried to bottle it up.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

I was in the city of Jogjakarta (also spelled as Yogyakarta) in May 2015. It was a short stay: I was primarily visiting Hong Kong, but then had to exit Hong Kong to re-enter because my visa-free stay had expired. Nearby countries would have served the purpose, but I chose Indonesia — six hours south by flight and across the equator — because I'd always been drawn to its size and diversity: thousands of islands in a tremendous sprawl (if the northwestern-most part of Indonesia started in Alaska, the archipelago would stretch all the way to Virginia); 240 million people, 87% of them Muslim, speaking 400 odd languages (even greater linguistic diversity than India); an unlikely national experiment that began in 1940s after centuries of Dutch colonial rule and a short but painful three years of Japanese occupation.

There was no way to capture even a fraction of that complexity in four days, but I wanted to start somewhere. Jakarta, the sprawling capital where I stayed the first night, was too daunting; but Jogjakarta, an hour's flight from the capital and which holds a unique place in Javanese culture, seemed more manageable. Here are some informal impressions: nothing very detailed, just a first take.

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by Sue Hubbard

It seems a long time ago since the Tate Summer party to celebrate the opening of the new Switch House adjoining the original Bankside Power Station. It was a different world then. On the 16th June, the date of the party, we were still in Europe. The architects Herzog & de Meuron, who did the conversion, are a Swiss firm based in Basel. They have worked with Tate for 20 years, originally to transform Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's power station. Since Tate Modern opened in May 2000 it has had more than 40 million visitors, many of them from abroad, coming to sample the unique cultural pleasures of this multi-cultural city. As a result of Tate Modern's presence the surrounding area of the South Bank that includes Shakespeare's Globe, has turned from a web of grey streets into a buzzing cosmopolitan hub filled with street performers and food stalls selling cuisine from around the world. It's become a must-see landmark. To walk across the Thames on Anthony Caro's lightening-flash of a bridge, with its vistas along the river east and west, is to feel that you are at the centre of one of the most exciting global capitals of the world.

The night of the party – despite the inefficiency of the lifts and mounting queues – I went with friends up to the viewing platform on the 10^th floor. The panorama is stunning. The city laid out below in 360-degrees with views of the Shard, Westminster Abbey, the Post Office Tower, Saint Paul's Cathedral and, down river, Wembley Stadium. This is a building designed and built in hope and optimism. A cultural temple that firmly puts us at the epicentre of the artistic world: inclusive, challenging, forward looking. At the opening party the place was awash with the great and the good: royalty, journalists and international art stars. The sense of possibility and optimism was palpable.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Photo by Ayesha Bokhari.

A breathless list of what you’re likely to see fifteen minutes before sunset on my Iftaar table: fruit chaat, a sweet and spicy fruit salad made mostly of apples from my yard, bananas, grapes, orange or lemon juice, chick peas, sometimes guavas and pomegranate seeds, dahi baray, chick pea fritters soaked in yogurt that is spiced with roasted, ground cumin and red chili, cholay, spicy beans, samosay, a deep fried beef- or potato- filled pastry. You’ll also see dates in a small dish and an assortment of frayed, speckled flowers from the yard. On a good day, you’ll see mint chutney, on most days, ketchup, Habanera, Sriracha. On a good day, sweet lassi, on most days, juice. During the countdown to Iftaar, which coincides with the Maghrib (sundown) call to prayer, a dinner item or two are on the stove, water is boiling for tea, and I’m in a frenzy to finish frying pakoray, chick pea fritters which must be served piping hot.

Needless to say, it’s hard to be in a good mood, to not feel drained after a day of fasting and an afternoon of cooking, but I try, as one must. When my children were old enough to reminisce, each of them remarked on how much they enjoyed the aroma and taste of Iftaar food: quite a dilemma for someone like myself who is not particularly in favor of having deep fried treats every day for a month.

If fasting for the month of Ramadan requires patience and stamina, cooking for Ramadan requires stamina plus a sustained effort to keep the home feeling like an island of festivity for the whole month, to keep up the Ramadan spirit against fatigue and a sense of alienation, as we try to meet work and school deadlines while fasting for up to 16 hours. We rarely change our regular routine, still attending meetings, taking the kids for soccer and piano practice, attending open houses and work parties. Self-discipline, and a quiet, unfussy, constant aim to rejuvenate inner peace in Ramadan is part of the Muslim life, but in the present climate of Islamophobia, I find myself needing to do more to shield the family during this time of reflection and private spirituality, from the news of violence and the violence of news, from outrage against being silenced, demonized, and consequent bitterness. Feast-like cooking, I notice, has become an act of self-preservation.

At a recent Iftaar-dinner for poet friends, I found myself commenting that an ideal iftaar is a simple, well-cooked, nutritious meal, and that Ramadan is not about elaborate iftaars, but about cultivating the spiritual self and renewing the bond with family and community by sharing in the hunger and the feeding, but I know from experience that it doesn’t work that way, that the Iftaar menu inherited from the culture gives a sense of atmosphere and nostalgia, constructs and punctuates tradition. So I chop the fruits and mix the chick pea paste, deep fry and garnish everything with chaat masala all month long, taking comfort and a measure of delight in the family’s expectation of the the month-long nightly party.

by Michael Liss

On September 19, 1796, less than two months prior to the meeting of the Electors to choose the next President of the United States, George Washington stunned the country by publishing “The Address of General Washington To The People of The United States on his declining of the Presidency of the United States”—what came to be known as Washington’s Farewell Address.

Washington was tired. The office had made him old before his time—compare the ubiquitous Gilbert Stuart “dollar-bill” paintings done in his second term to the immensely vigorous figure you see in Charles Willson Peale’s full length portrait after the Battle of Trenton. Still, the Presidency would have been his to keep, probably for life, if he had wanted. His prestige was immense, his character considered unimpeachable, and his words carried enormous weight.

“Weight” also described the text. In an era where there were no page limits, The Farewell Address just keeps on going—32 densely-handwritten pages and well over 6000 words when set in type. And as to the prose, there is just no lift, no color, no poetry. People think they remember “beware of foreign entanglements,” but even that is incorrect–the exact quote is “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

Therein lies the paradox–the famous speech that no one can accurately recall because no one can get through it. My daughter gave me a collection of 40 great American speeches. The Farewell Address is included, but with at least 80% of it “abridged.” Seems as if the editor couldn’t get through it either.

There is something oddly appropriate about this. Washington wasn’t eloquent. Monuments rarely are. At times, it seems he was barely human—he was Flexner’s Indispensable Man, transitioning from warrior-chief to an immovable stone obelisk to which the ship of state could be lashed in any storm. What people get out of the Farewell, after wading through the prolixity, is his strength and steadfastness—his primary bequest to the country. Here, he voluntarily gives up power; there, he reassures that great things have been accomplished by forming a Union; and, finally, he warns of dangers and advises on how to reduce them.

Can we stop with that—is that enough? Do we really need more from Washington, beyond seeing him as a colossus?

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by Paul North

F. Undine in his Brooklyn studio, June 2016

In the third installment of “Current Genres of Fate” I want to think about a mode of fate that has been all the rage for the last 20 years or so. Let's call it “the persistence of the past.” For some time before that, as is well known, it was the rage to remark on the speed with which we were leaving the past behind. Rages come and go. It was oddly pleasurable to discover, in the midst of our progress, that the past had kept right up with us. Now we happily talk about how little has changed. But however cutting edge it has recently seemed, the idea that the past persists within or behind the newness of things is at least as old as our ideas of progress. Darwin tells about a species driven toward innovation that at the same time keeps intimate ties with the deep past. Freud says a new psychic attachment is a guise for a primal ur-attachment.

You will never be rid of the past. This is surely a fateful way of understanding the past's persistence. But this fate does not have to be bad. Just because we are shadowed by the old does not mean we are its puppets or have no freedom at all. What's more, the idea that the past persists can have a salutary effect. It may soften our fetish for change, turn our fever for forward movement to reticence, relax the continual, tortured desire to “move on.” On the other hand, if we admit that the past persists, it does seem unlikely that we will ever achieve total freedom. Accepting this mode of fate ruins the fantasy that we could have no constraints whatever.

An artist named Friese Undine has made it his responsibility to cast shadows on the idea of progress in life as well as in art. Undine proposes to stain putatively current images with blotches of the past. In art this is particularly hard to do, since art, visual art—‘contemporary' art—seems over the last 150 years or so to have signed a pact with progress-lovers in other walks of life, like politics and economics. Art wants to consign the past to the past just like they do. We associate this gesture with “modernism”—waving away tradition, refusing conventional subjects and traditional techniques. With its dismissive wave, modern art kept up with capitalism. “Make it new” was the aesthetic rallying cry of a century, until, at a certain point, the sheen on the plastic packing rubbed off. Newness got old. The only novelty left to plunder was the past. Yet even the return to past forms—in order to quote styles, ridicule out of date wishes, to consciously recycle images or to debase conventions, and all the rest—even this way of doing art that saw the past as a storehouse of gestures to be repurposed, also denied that the past simply persists. Artists could not proceed plundering the past if it were not dead. They could not innovate and renovate and at the same time admit that the past had never actually passed.

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by Humera Afridi

I want to hear her: bold; questioning; insistent, refusing to compromise her ideals. I want to understand; to see, her: this woman of deep faith, with a distinctive laugh, who “had no equal among either the women or the men of her century.” Possessed of a brilliant mind and exceptional memory, she was controversial—beloved, reviled, envied, not averse to taking risks in the service of truth and justice. Falsely accused of adultery, she was publicly defended by her husband, Seal of the Prophets and a political leader, who took to the minbar and challenged the men bent on sullying her name and that of his household. At 42, she led an army against the fourth Caliph—the infamous Battle of the Camel in the mid-seventh century—in which she suffered devastating losses. Mother of the Believers, yet herself childless. Youngest wife of Prophet Muhammad. Transmitter of two thirds of his sayings, the Hadith or traditions, that are treasured keys to a deeper understanding of the Quran and the commentaries written on its divinely revealed verses.

But: where is Aisha today?

When we speak of Muslim women, or the status of women in Islam, harking back always to that distant past—seventh century Arabia—which through a prismatic lens continues to determine our present, why are the Mothers of the Believers silent, invisible, absent? Asked whom he loved the most, Prophet Muhammad, magnificent warrior against misogyny in egregiously patriarchal Arabia, unhesitatingly declared, “Aisha!” Aisha in whose lap he breathed his last breath before he passed into the Realm of Beauty.

All this to say, Aisha was far from flat. She was refreshingly complex, multi-dimensional, a “round character”—to borrow a literary term from E. M. Forster—filled with the breath of God. And she wasn't the only one. Well before her, there was Khadijah, the Prophet's first wife—with whom he had monogamous relationship for twenty-five years until her death—savvy business woman, older than him by over a decade, a former widow, who on discerning his gentle and upright character, qualities she deemed attractive in a man, proposed marriage to him when he was a lad of 25 and in her employ.

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by Dave Maier

As someone who lived through the surreal drug-war dystopia of the 1980s, I have always assumed that the collected forces behind it (right-wing authoritarianism, progressive nanny-statism, the law enforcement, private-prison, and Big Pharma lobbies, general aversion to other races and/or dirty f’ing hippies, inertia and lack of imagination, etc.) would render it a permanent fixture of our political landscape, at least in the USA. So even after two states re-legalized marijuana in 2012 (and two more since), I didn’t pay much attention. It simply remained inconceivable to me that it would go beyond that.

Nowadays, however, one hears frequently that re-legalization of marijuana and perhaps even all “illicit” drugs is inevitable and in fact will happen sooner rather than later. The thought is that young people (i.e. new voters) are strongly in favor of re-legalization and only older people (i.e. those preparing to shuffle off this mortal coil and thus off the voting rolls) are strongly against – and even the latter are discovering, perhaps to their surprise, the apparently wondrous utility (if anecdote be any guide) of medical cannabis. The latest nationwide polls on the issue show Americans favoring the end of marijuana prohibition by wide margins (58-39, 56-36, numbers like that), suggesting a cultural shift as momentous and sudden (at least to those not paying attention, such as myself) as that which has led to today’s widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage.

So I thought I better get up to speed and hit the books. I don’t have a tightly argued, persuasive essay for you, and I am still only halfway through a fairly tall stack of relevant literature, but I can at least pass on some recommendations and share some speculation over the next couple of columns.

I'd start with Dan Baum’s authoritative study Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (1996). This will fire your outrage and keep you going through some of the more pedestrian public-policy issues, as well as dauntingly complex psychopharmacology, on offer later on. Baum insists that the book is not a manifesto for legalization, but rather an examination of the genesis of the war, which he traces to the election of 1968, and its escalation into “a policy as expensive, ineffective, delusional, and destructive as government gets.”

A recurrent theme in Baum’s story, as he notes in his introduction, is that “[t]he War on Drugs is about a lot of things, but only rarely is it really about drugs.” Notoriously high on President Nixon’s paranoid list of enemies were “the blacks” and “the hippies”, and by fomenting drug war he saw a way to attack both at once. When his hand-picked Presidential Commission on Marijuana (a.k.a. the Shafer Commission) failed to provide the desired denunciations of drug use (Nixon had demanded “a goddamn strong statement about marijuana … one that just tears the ass out of them”), Nixon simply ignored it. In any case Congress had already passed the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which still determines government policy in this area to this day. The drug war – or at least its modern phase – had begun.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

When it comes to private art collections, not many places have the richness and diversity of Italy. Of course, Italy also has a few great national museums too. But that is not where one usually heads to find the cream of the crop of the country's fine art. For in Italy, the famed pictures and sculptures are mainly to be seen in the once legendary private collections of long-dead dukes and princes; as well as in those of Renaissance mercenaries and bankers –not to mention the art still found miraculously in the the churches for which they were originally created. Beautiful gems, these private collections are in part why going to Italy to see art somehow feels more an act of pilgrimage than of travel.

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by Evan Edwards

Last month was the 197th anniversary of the birth of American poet, Walt Whitman. While one hundred and ninety-seven isn’t as clean as a good, solid, two hundred years of the grandfather of free verse, I reckon we’ll just have to make do with it until 2019. Still, it has been a very good year for Whitman, and for those impassioned by his work. In February, one of the hundreds if not thousands of letters that he wrote for dying soldiers during the Civil War turned up in a Washington archive. But even more significantly, last summer, a 13-part column series on “manly health,” written by Whitman, was discovered, verified, and then published in April of this year. Since Whitman was a prolific writer, newly discovered texts of his crop up every year or so; but this series of columns is another beast entirely. Weighing in at over one hundred and twenty pages, the text’s discovery was not just the addition of a small fragment or marginalia to the oeuvre, not even just a new article written during his years as a journalist, but an entirely new text.

When Leaves of Grass was first published in 1855, the book of untitled, authorless, largely unorganized verse was just ninety pages. Over the course of the next thirty one years, he would add, organize, reorganize, subtract, and alter the poems, so that the text ended up being around four hundred leaves or so. This is only important to note when we consider that the columns on health were written in the years just after the publication of the first edition. Just like a series of lectures that were written around and after the first edition, lectures which were supposed to eventually replace the original introductory essay, this series on manly health seems to be conceived as a sibling project to the poems.

The essay that precedes the first edition, written in the days just preceding its publication, as well as the lectures written to replace that essay, and the columns on manly health that sought to replace those lectures, all of these share a common theme: they are Whitman’s admitted attempts to “explain” or “fulfill” the poetry for which he was so famous.

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by Bill Benzon

The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

—Yeats

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

—Kafka

I woke up at 1:17 AM a couple nights ago, a dream on my mind. Which is unusual, because I generally do not remember dreams.

It was night and I was walking along the street outside an aged building where I occupied an apartment on the first floor. To my surprise and dismay the external wall along one side of my apartment was completely gone. It had been in bad shape and needed repair, but why hadn’t my landlord given me notice about the repairs? I’d been thinking of inviting my father to visit me, but I couldn’t do that now. And how could I protect my things from thieves? So I went to the rear of the building, clambered up an external wall and over the roof of a rear-facing porch and through a window into a second floor apartment. I looked around, went past the occupants, who were sitting on mattresses on the floor and paid me no mind, and entered the front apartment on the second floor where I did the same thing. So did they. I walked down the stairs to the first floor where I entered my apartment through the door. Now I was in my apartment and looking into the street through the wall that was no longer there.

That’s when I awoke. There was of course more to the dream than that, But I don’t recall it very well and, in any event, dreams and prose are such very different things that any account I give will be as much invention as recollection. So it is with that first paragraph.

The thing is, I recognized that apartment. It seemed that I’d been there in other dreams, dreams years ago. But that apartment also seemed like a diffuse and distracted amalgam of apartments I’d occupied in Baltimore, Buffalo, Troy NY, and even Jersey City.

I remembered that before I’d fallen asleep I’d been thinking of writing this piece. Not so much about Brexit as about a diffuse wandering state of mind. Start with Brexit and see where it takes me.

For you see, I’m not expert in any of the various things that would allow me to lay claim to serious insight into the referendum that just took place in Britain. It’s just one of the things that flows through my mind these days, along with Trump, Sanders, and Hillary; territorial disputes in the South China Sea; drone warfare; and just when are we going to see self-driving vehicles on the open road? I claim no particular expertise in these matters either, but they enter my mind where I entertain them. In the one case I’m going to have to vote.

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by Matt McKenna

More than the thousands of articles laboriously describing the apocalyptic state of American politics in 2016, the low-brow Kevin Hart comedy Central Intelligence is the most efficient and accurate portrayal of the circus we’ve created out of our Presidential election process. In hindsight, it seems odd to expect long-read think-pieces in periodicals like the New Yorker to shed light on what is less of a democratic election and more of a reality show called “Who Wants to be the President”. Indeed, a run-of-the-mill summer comedy with the crass tagline “Saving the world takes a little Hart and a big Johnson” seems the more appropriate medium to comment on our equally crass election. So perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that director Rawson Thurber’s Central Intelligence isn’t just reasonably funny, but it also provides a legitimate critique of American politics.

Central Intelligence co-stars Kevin Hart and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Hart plays Calvin Joyner, an accountant who is bummed out because he used to be cool in high school, but now he’s boring. Johnson plays Bob Stone, a CIA operative who was bullied mercilessly in high school, but now he’s super jacked. Because Calvin was nice one time to Bob in high school, Bob recruits Calvin to help him on some cockamamie save-the-world mission involving satellites, access codes, and Aaron Paul implausibly portraying a CIA agent. The story, of course, doesn’t make sense, nor was it designed to make sense, which is the first clue the film is actually commenting on American politics.

The humor in Central Intelligence stems from the conflict between the diminutive Calvin and the gargantuan Bob. Calvin is a stuck-up white-collar jerk, and Bob is an naive violence-loving semi-idiot. The film has therefore patterned its leads after the stereotypes of the two major political parties in America; Calvin represents Democrats with their politically correct, holier-than-thou elitism, and Bob represents Republicans with their inability to solve problems in a way that doesn’t involve applying violence to something. Neither party gets a pass in the film–Calvin is frequently the butt of the joke as he sheepishly runs from conflict and is unable to take care of himself. And though he is able to beat people up, the motivation for Bob to develop his physically dominating stature is his feeling emasculated as an adolescent.

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by Ahmed Humayun

“Mr. Obama's refusal to speak of “radical Islam” also betrays his failure to understand the sources of Islamic State's legitimacy and thus its allure to young Muslim men….Mr. Obama's refusal to acknowledge the real nature of the Islamist threat creates an opening for Mr. Trump's immigration ban. It suggests to Americans that the President is so hostage to political correctness that he might not be doing all he can to combat the threat.” Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2016.

If you follow the debate about terrorism, Islam, and anti-Muslim bigotry in America today, you will observe a small but strident faction fixated on American officials and leaders who do not use the phrase ‘radical Islam' to describe terrorist groups like ISIL, Al Qaeda, and others. This faction maintains that if you do not talk about terrorism through the prism of Islam, you are soft on terror, you lack moral clarity, and you are paralyzed by political correctness.

This is a heavy burden for one phrase to bear. The good news is that there is no evidence that American security and law enforcement agencies have been 'soft' on terror. Under the current administration, numerous operations have been conducted around the world to disrupt the operations of terrorist groups, even resulting in the capture of Bin Laden, the perpetrator of the September 11 attacks. The lack of use of the phrase ‘radical Islam' by our leaders has not prevented these operations from occurring or succeeding.

In fact, blurring the distinction between Islam and terrorism will hurt counterterrorism efforts rather than aid them. While it is true that terminology is important in this struggle, the Journal's editorial board has it exactly backwards. Consider that ISIL wants to be called the ‘Islamic State', and that it has previously threatened to cut the tongues out of people who refer to it as Da'esh. ISIL's leaders want the world to make no distinction between Islam and its brutish practices. They claim exclusive authority to speak on behalf of Islam, and they slaughter anyone else who has a different view. When we say that ISIL is Islamic, we concede their core contention at the outset. We can either deny our enemies what they want, or we can hand it to them on a silver platter.

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Eden

the 5 pm Magnolia tree
is flaunting its lemony green leaves again
lush as every rite of spring,
fresh, pregnant with light, it makes
the quaking Aspen near the hoop house tremble
its leaves aroused by breeze
as we all, in this utterly new ensemble,
excited as if on some brink, are poised,
unprepared for what comes next, but resolute,
pressed always by the force of nature
which ever sends the unforeseen
in the arms of the expected
to place it at our feet
often tangled (but replete)
to tease apart, to work it out,
to look at it from every angle
to find a way through every doubt
but canny, careful not to go for
every fruit it dangles

Jim Culleny
6/18/16
.

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

In the real world of political talk, getting the last word is often what counts most. This is especially the case where political talk is conducted in the limited space between commercial breaks. In such a forum, “getting the last word” does not mean what it means in a purely academic setting. In academic argument, one gets the last word when one articulates a decisive point, a point to which not even one's smartest and best informed opponents could object. In popular political talk, by contrast, “getting the last word” means being the last speaker to utter a coherent and self-contained thought. Statements of this self-contained variety tend to be received by one's audience as the “take away” from the exchange, and hence they are most likely to be remembered. The arena of national politics is high-stakes and highly-public; and the need to get the last word creates a strong incentive for a distinctive kind of conversational distortion, namely, that of derailing discussion. One derails a discussion when one speaks for the sake of creating a conversational disruption that substitutes the topic previously under consideration with some ambiguous and unwieldy alternative. Once derailed in this sense, conversation loses focus, and the disorientation leaves subsequent speakers unable to get the last word.

Derailing of course takes many forms. But one derailing strategy has become so prevalent in current political discourse that it is worthy of focused analysis.

The derailing strategy we have in mind may be called spitballing. At its core, spitballing works as follows: One makes multiple contributions to a discussion, often as fast as one can think them up (and certainly faster than one can think them through). Some contributions may be insightful, others less so, but all are overtly provocative. What is most important, though, is that each installment express a single, self-contained thought. Accordingly, slogans are the spitballer's dialectical currency. As the metaphor of the spitball goes, one keeps tossing until something sticks; hence it helps if one's slogans are tinged with something disagreeable or slightly beyond the pale. As the spitballer's interlocutors attempt to reply to what he has said, the spitballer resolutely continues spitballing.

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