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Aug 16, 2022Liked by Justin Smith-Ruiu

As the person who lent you The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle back in the day, I am distinctly flattered that you found my recommendation worthwhile, given the rarity of such a thing. I definitely have a number of things on my list b/c of you!

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Aug 17, 2022·edited Aug 17, 2022Liked by Justin Smith-Ruiu

I got to Rushdie from Hitchens, since you mention him. I started with "Midnight's Children" and then immediately read everything (except it never occurred to me to search him on substack, so thank you, thank you for that)

The only author I ever found due to book banning was Nabokov, very worth it.

As to your book: Bad reviews often involve a misunderstanding of purpose, and here it seems to stem from the title. (Did you even choose that?)

The reviewer seems to think that you are attempting to solve something, when I read it as something to contemplate and enjoyed it entirely on those grounds.

This is another excellent essay.

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Aug 17, 2022Liked by Justin Smith-Ruiu

Wow... talk about the politics of the exception, it turns out that the questionable medical procedure of rectal feeding was practiced on individuals who fall at opposite extremes of the American Rule of Law - on Garfield, who, as POTUS enjoyed some degree of "executive privilege" -as close as one can get to being "above the law" in this system- and on certain of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, those subjects of "indefinite detention" and "enhanced interrogation" who have been denied due process in so many respects.

That is quite a find with the Bliss study. In as much as Garfield was kept alive for a month or so, it would answer in the affirmative a question that had been posed when the Gitmo story was in the news: "Is rectal feeding an actual modern medical practice?" https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/rectal-rehydration-medical-practice-used-todays-doctors

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I too was approaching Gare de Lyon at the time of the shooting, delayed by work which thwarted my plans to attend the Eagles of Death Metal show. Such a hectic scene and only discovering days later just how close we could have come.

Messages from friends and family to “stay safe” came rushing through but my reply was that if I was to stay safe, by staying locked away and not enjoying the freedom with which the West is famously known, the extremists would win. I vowed never to do such a thing.

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Two recommendations, sparked by this post. (I know you said you rarely taken them, but I will brave the odds.)

First, Stephen Sondheim's ASSASSINS is just splendid. I think the original cast recording is the best. Great songs about (among others) Charles Guiteau & Leon Czolgosz.

Second, on the subject of movies about Stalin's death, the fairly recent film THE DEATH OF STALIN is the funniest thing I have seen in a decade or more. If you like really, really black humor.

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Sep 24, 2022·edited Sep 24, 2022

I read "Satanic Verses" in undergrad, at a small liberal arts college in Chatauqua County, not far from the Institute. It's primarily a book about immigration and assimilation, but has a chapter depicting - very unflatteringly - a Khomeni-like character living in exile in Europe. The book is less insulting to Islam, arguably, than to the Ayatollah.

I spent much of my adult life in western NY, living not far from the site of the Pan Am exhibition. My grandmother's grandfather was a city police captain, and his precinct guarded McKinley's assassin from a lynch mob outside; My great grandmother saw the Native American warlord Geronimo on display there, in a cage, as if he were a POW or a dangerous predator. (In reality, he was paid handsomely for his appearance, and was later seen having a drink at the Lafayette.)

There was very little revivalist or religious activity there in the late 20th century, a century, almost, after McKinley's assassination. Nearly everyone was and largely still is Roman Catholic, moreso ethnically than theologically, and fervor was limited to an hour of Mass every Sunday, if that.

For that reason, perhaps, and because of America's relative isolation between two oceans, religious violence was nearly incomprehensible to us in that era. In the secular America of the last century, a murder or a terrorist attack in response to a book or a cartoon was so foreign an idea as to be nonsensical. We really weren't aware that an idea, or an artwork, or a set of words, could incite large swathes of another society to deadly violence.

We are sadder and wiser today. Hitchens was more than prescient when he castigated those who would censor others as nascent totalitarians, the enemies of both artistic and political freedoms.

We now have formerly liberal people advocating for the censorship of not just political ideas, but also of factual events. We have our once strictly apolitical law enforcement and intelligence agencies openly pursuing political figures, and tech media executives happily squelching factual stories and political opinions, along with, often, the careers of those who mention them.

I date the American left's huge shift from liberalism to authoritarianism (for lack of a better word) to about 9/11. That's when the abandonment of liberal principles like free speech and due process began to be replaced by state controls and identity politics, two things many liberals, like Hitchens, despised as much as they despised religion.

It's also ironic that the epitome of leftist elitism, the Chatauqua Institute, witnessed an attempted murder, as the victim was about to deliver a speech in favor of free speech. I imagine some of the very well heeled leftists (we can no longer call them liberal, and admission to the Institute or especially a cottage there are both well beyond expensive) in the audience were not converted to free speech absolutism, and instead thought Rushdie foolish to provoke such a reaction.

Which is, of course, exactly how we'll lose our liberal, constitutional democracy, and therefore our society - through apathy, oikophobia, and cowardice.

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The Oneida Community wasn't responsible for Giteau's disturbed personality. Noyes' conceptions of "male continence" and "complex marriage" were idiosyncratic, to be sure, but he was only one example of a kind of religious and communal experimentation that was common in America in his time. He was no David Koresh, and the Community did not correspond to our modern idea of a mind-control cult. The generation-long success of the Community was a function of group decision-making. Several children who grew up there later published memoirs reflecting their favorable memories.

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To write the unforgiving and unforgivable innocent novel that became a burr up the ass of a power hungry and mad preacher who ignited a world of hate that a Spanish guitar cannot ever end playing:

this is an ugly antidote to something like a peace corps, which could never douse or end the bleeding, .

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