Forget last night’s speech. For me the most unforgettable moments of the Denver convention were the two video reports by NYT media columnist David Carr.

Carr’s column is the first thing I turn to in the Times on a Monday morning. And I have watched with interest in recent months as The Night of the Gun, his memoir about life as a drug addict, received a succession of glowing reviews.

But how did a former junkie make it as a media columnist at one of the world’s most prestigious newspapers? It all makes a lot more sense now:

Nice to see London correspondent Sarah Lyall’s latest dispatch on the British has made the New York Times most emailed list. This week Lyall (who has a new book out) focuses on the British love of spending one or two weeks each summer in a small European resort downing lager and cheap shots before throwing up all over the street. Or worse.

As Gawker points out, it’s Lyall’s tenth British booze story in the past eight years—not a bad record considering alcohol-fueled sex, violence and vandalism is a perennial topic in the UK press.

The question is always, why us? How come the French seem able to sip wine sensibly with every meal and the Germans to chink glasses merrily in beer halls across Bavaria? Even the Russians, who die in their thousands from alcoholism and cheap vodka, don’t feel compelled to run around city centers on a Saturday night trying to ram their tongues (or fists) down the nearest person’s throat.

Scotsman Alex Massie has some interesting thoughts:

It is true that other countries do not behave like this. Perhaps they have adapted to modernity better than Britons. But if one takes a longer or broader look at the matter then one realises that this sort of boorish drunkeness has been the norm, not the exception in British history. There were reasons beyond a desire for control and the pleasures of tut-tutting disapproval for the rise of the temperance movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Fun fact: Winston Churchill was kicked out of the House of Commons in 1922 when he lost his Dundee seat to Neddy Scrymgeour of the Scottish Prohibition Party. Second fun, or surprising fact: whole areas of Glasgow, such as Cathcart, remained dry until as recently as the 1970s).

One need only think of Hogarth’s etchings warning of the pernicious social consequences of drink or, a century later, of Cruikshank’s cartoons such as “The Bottle” or “The Worship of Bacchus” to remember that booze has been a, perhaps the, major social issue in Britain for at least the past quarter of a millenium. Of course, Hogarth championed Beer Street as a sweet and healthy alternative to the sozzled excess of Gin Lane but then again, beer was generally healthier than water in those days.

Some Britons Too Unruly for Resorts in Europe (NYT)
From Gin Lane to Faliraki (Alex Massie)

I know I have lived in America for almost five years now and so I should be used to all of the schmaltz and ceremony of a presidential election, but do people really believe this guff? The excerpts I saw of Michelle Obama’s speech last night were more like the outtakes from a second rate Cameron Crowe movie than anything resembling real politics. So why is everyone so excited about it?

Much more interesting to follow the ongoing on air spat between MSNBC’s three political anchors here and here, courtesy of Gawker.

Frank Rich launched a withering attack on an out-of-touch and over-the-hill John McCain, in this weekend’s New York Times:

What we have learned this summer is this: McCain’s trigger-happy temperament and reactionary policies offer worse than no change. He is an unstable bridge back not just to Bush policies but to an increasingly distant 20th-century America that is still fighting Red China in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in the cold war. As the country tries to navigate the fast-moving changes of the 21st century, McCain would put America on hold.

[...] most Americans have turned their backs on the Iraq war, no matter how much McCain keeps bellowing about “victory.” The Bush White House is now poised to alight with the Iraqi government on a withdrawal timetable far closer to Obama’s 16 months than McCain’s vague promise of a 2013 endgame. As Gen. David Petraeus returns home, McCain increasingly resembles those mad Japanese soldiers who remained at war on remote Pacific islands years after Hiroshima.

[...]Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization? Does a bellicose
Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?

Americans have a lot to choose between this November: black and white, old and young, experience and inexperience, change and continuity.

But the idea of electing a man who sees a world through decades-old eyes, who is unfamiliar with Google, who repeatedly forgets that Czechoslovakia ceased to exist fifteen years ago, and who can’t see beyond Vladimir Putin’s Soviet past really worries me.

Surely White House advisors have enough to do briefing the president on national and international events each morning, without having to take him aside every other day and give him a crash course in contemporary history and computer literacy?

Last Call for Change We Can Believe In (NYT)

David Remnick’s opinion piece in this week’s New Yorker is probably the best thing I have read on the Russia-Georgia crisis for some time:

Taken individually, the West’s actions since the collapse of the Soviet Union—from the inclusion of the Baltic and the Central European states in NATO to the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state—can be rationalized on strategic and moral grounds. But taken together these actions were bound to engender deep-seated feelings of national resentment among Russians, especially as, through the nineteen-nineties, they suffered an unprecedentedly rapid downward spiral. Even ordinary Russians find it mightily trying to be lectured on questions of sovereignty and moral diplomacy by the West, particularly the United States, which, even before Iraq, had a long history of foreign intervention, overt and covert—politics by other means. After the exposure of the Bush Administration’s behavior prior to the invasion of Iraq and its unapologetic use of torture, why would any leader, much less Putin, respond to moral suasion from Washington? That is America’s tragedy, and the world’s.

There is little doubt that the Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, provided Putin with his long-awaited casus belli when he ordered the shelling of South Ossetia, on August 7th. But Putin’s war, of course, is not about the splendors of South Ossetia, a duchy run by the Russian secret service and criminal gangs. It is a war of demonstration. Putin is demonstrating that he is willing to use force; that he is unwilling to let Georgia and Ukraine enter NATO without exacting a severe price; and that he views the United States as hypocritical, overextended, distracted, and reluctant to make good on its protective assurances to the likes of Georgia.

Inevitably, a number of neoconservative commentators, along with John McCain, have rushed in to analyze this conflict using familiar analogies: the Nazi threat in the late nineteen-thirties; the Soviet invasions of Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. But while Putin’s actions this past week have inspired genuine alarm in Kiev and beyond, such analogies can lead to heedless policy. As the English theologian Bishop Joseph Butler wrote, “Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.” Cartoonish rhetoric only contributes to the dangerous return of what some conservatives seem to crave—the other, the enemy, the us versus them of the Cold War.

Boundary Issues (TNY)

Fisherman’s hut window, Menemsha, August 2008.

August 2008.

• Cold Friends, Wrapped in Mink and Medals – NYTimes.com
  (tags: Reading-List)