A Shana Tova to all. Thank you so much for reading. I will do my best to make this year more worth your while.

Edward Said passed away today.

I'm not qualified to judge his scholarship, though the fact that two of his biggest targets were Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami doesn't inspire confidence. And I'm not going to dwell on his complicated relationship with his past , his unique variety of "political protest", or even his general Palestinian activism.

In a 1999 profile, A.O. Scott wrote :

More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing "criticism over solidarity," speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail.
(Emphasis added.)

I'd argue that few if any intellectuals of his generation can truly be said to have been more devoted to "gods that fail." Said spent much of the 1970s and 1980s advocating for a two-state solution for the Israelis and Palestinians. But when faced with the possibility that such a solution might actually be possible, Said became a fierce enemy of the concept and the means of its realization. Rather than agitating for a way to make the Oslo Accords better, he denounced Yasser Arafat as a dictator and a sellout. (The "dictator" part was certainly true, but Said's sudden discovery of those tendencies after a long history as an Arafat adviser does not speak well of his powers of observance.) Rather than trying to work against Arafat to build a better Palestinian society during the Oslo years, he became a leader of the intellectual resistance to the whole two-state enterprise. His proposal was a "secular, binational state" - an idea that only makes sense in the ivory tower. It is well known that the Palestinians supported Yasser Arafat's refusal to accept the Palestinian state offered at Camp David, believing they could get all of Israel. They were encouraged in this hope by intellectuals such as Said:

The intellectual guardians of Arab nationalist orthodoxy--Said, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, Egyptian cultural leader Saad Eddin Wahbe, Egyptian editor and pundit Mohamed Heikal--have never accepted the fact of Israel; they cannot envision a world without the rallying cause of anti-Zionism. Nothing could have been more infuriating to them than the sight of Yasser Arafat, the embodiment of Palestinian nationalism, shaking hands with Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's late prime minister. They never forgave Arafat for bowing to what Ajami calls "the logic of brute, irreversible facts." To them, the 1993 Oslo accords meant settling for a sadly truncated form of Palestinian self-rule without extracting an Israeli admission of wrongdoing. Indeed, Said and other rejectionists showed a perverse glee when Israel's dovish Labor Party was defeated by Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud. Here, again, was a world they could understand. "Men love the troubles they know," Ajami witheringly observes.

The terror war waged against Israel over the last three years is a direct result of such fantasies - the refusal to engage reality based on enthrallment to "gods that fail." And nobody embodied that peculiar type of "intellectual" better than Edward Said.
Fortunately, he can no longer avoid accountability for the consequences of his actions.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn does it better, quoting something he wrote not long after 9/11:

Take away all the infidel products and you’d be left with a loser in yak-wool boxers standing in a cave shouting to himself. Osama had an infidel watch (Timex Ironman Triathlon), infidel fatigues (army-surplus US battle dress), infidel hand-mike, infidel camera. This is presumably an example of what Professor Edward Said, the distinguished New York-based America-disparager, calls the “interconnectedness” of the west and Islam. The Prof deplores the tendency, in the wake of September 11th, to separate cultures into what he called “sealed-off entities”, when in reality western civilisation and the Muslim world are so “intertwined” that it’s impossible to “draw the line” between them.

This pitch isn’t getting a lot of respect. “The line seems pretty clear,” said Rich Lowry, editor of National Review. “Developing mass commercial aviation and soaring skyscrapers was the west’s idea; slashing the throats of stewardesses and flying the planes into the skyscrapers was radical Islam’s idea.”

The Jewish Week has a short profile of Rena Sofer, one of the stars of NBC's new series "Coupling" - a show which supposedly "follows the mating habits of six friends who stop having sex only long enough to talk about it."

Rena Sofer will have come a long way since her days as a yeshiva girl in New Jersey.

It’s not a likely career path for a former student of Achei Temimim, a Lubavitch grade school in Massachusetts, or the Frisch High School in Paramus. Sofer’s father, Martin, is an Orthodox rabbi, as anyone who peruses her online biography or recent media interviews will learn.

I wonder if Frisch will be publicizing Sofer as one of its alumni - probably not, unless she wants to make a large donation.

Sofer’s character, Susan, is “a beautiful and sexy go-getter with an uninhibited attitude toward life and the world of romance,” according to network publicity.

I don't think that was on Frisch's curriculum.

A while ago, I was writing a long post about Social Security and the payroll tax that funds it, and why a) the Republicans had success pushing for giving individuals the power to direct their Social Security contriubtions and b) why the intermittent calls to remove the cap on SS payroll taxes are invariably a confession of ignorance as to how SS works. But my computer crashed midway through the post and I never got back to it.

Well, Megan McArdle cites an outstanding piece by Jacob Levy that discusses the subject in passing, more concisely than my would-be-efforts. He touches on all the important points:

If the payroll tax is just a tax, not something special like an insurance premium or forced savings-- that is, if it ought to be counted in a way that is detached from Social Security payouts at the other end-- then the tax system is barely progressive, and could be tipped into being regressive overall. If the payroll tax is not just a tax but something special that should be counted alongside the ostensible benefits it ostensibly purchases, then this is not true. The payroll tax is the largest share of the tax burden for (I believe this is right) most Americans. It is proportional-- but only on earned income, and only up to a certain income cap. So it makes a big difference in the overall calculations-- and how we count it makes a big difference.

I think that the payroll tax is just a tax, and that Social Security is just a spending program. But that's not the official position; and it's not ordinarily the position of those who support a continued state system of Social Security. Hence the desire to take Social Security off-budget, to treat its surplus as different from other state funds, and so on. Hence the unwillingness to means-test Social Security-- in order to preserve the illusion of social insurance "bought" with one's "premiums." Hence the unwillingness to lift the income cap on the payroll tax-- because then we'd either have to allow benefits paid to the richest retirees to skyrocket, or we'd have to admit that one's taxes don't really purchase one's own benefits. In other words, I want to concede that the payroll tax is just a tax, making the tax system as a whole borderline-regressive-- and then to insist on the consequences that follow from that. But I dislike any attempt to have it both ways-- to treat the payroll tax as just a tax for purposes of calculating regressivity, but to treat it as something quite different when it comes to discussing Social Security as a program.

(Emphases added.)

I can't count the number of editorials and opinion pieces over the years bemoaning the regressivity of SS taxes and advocating either cuts in the taxes paid or doing away with the income caps. Those pieces never (as far as I've seen) even address the ostensible relationship between tax contributions and future benefits that is at the heart of the way Social Security is sold to the population. The problem is exactly as Levy discusses: assuming the caps are raised or abolished, what "return" should the taxpayers get on contributions made into the system at the new income levels? If it is anything above zero, then a) you haven't helped the long-term sustainability of the system at all and b) eventual SS payouts will then be accordingly tilted in favor fo those who have made such large contributions - i.e., in favor of the "rich." Currently, the distribution of SS payouts is pretty progressive, and that is due to the income caps on contributions; abolishing those caps will make the distribution of SS payouts track the distribution of income and taxes paid in the country - i.e., not progressive at all.

On the other hand, if the "return" on such elevated contributions is zero, then you've just officially abandoned the "illusion of social insurance 'bought' with one's 'premiums.'", in Levy's words. In that case, SS is nothing but a (very effective) redistributive program - why not go about it more efficiently and means-test? Most liberals are horrified at the thought, as it goes counter to one of the main tenents of what Jonathan Cohn and Ed Haislmaier recently called the "Unreformed Church of Social Insurance of the Strict Observance." As Cohn described the rationale for that stricture in connection with a proposed prescription drug benefit:

In the real world, universal programs thrive while means-tested programs barely survive, if at all. As a case study, simply look at Medicare and Medicaid, enacted at the same time. Because Medicaid benefits only the poor, it lacks a constituency with sufficient political clout to protect it from cuts whenever Washington or the states start trimming budgets. Those cuts inevitably leave people on Medicaid without medical access, either because it doesn't cover particular populations--leaving them uninsured--or pays such atrociously low fees that many medical providers refuse it--leaving those with coverage without doctors to see.

So I guess you can count me as a member of the Church. I indeed think a Medicare drug benefit should be universal, because I fear anything else won't survive long politically.

The argument is professed with even greater devotion with respect to Social Security.

So if you're wondering why you read so many pieces bemoaning the inequality of capping the income subject to Social Security taxes and never hear of anything done about it, it's because - not for the first time! - there is a fundamental disconnect between the popular description of the problem and the underlying facts of the matter.

David Edelstein, , in reviewing the new vampire movie Underworld::

As we Christopher Lee fans can attest, there's something hugely satisfying about seeing regal English snobs with perfect enunciation hiss through bared fangs while drooling blood. It clarifies so much about Great Britain's role in world history.