I missed this over the weekend, but here’s Garrison Keillor tearing a strip off of Bernard-Henri Lévy and his book about America. (The San Francisco Chronicle “liked it a bit better”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/29/RVGHUGQ7341.DTL&type=books, but only a bit.) Based on Keillor’s review, it sounds like BHL has a case of the disease that Bruce McCall brilliantly parodied in his travelogue “In the New Canada, Living is a Way of Life.” That article (which I’ve “talked about before”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/01/13/how-peculiar/) is written in the prose characteristic of the cultural tourist/feature writer touring around Russia, c.1982 for _Readers Digest_: serious, curious, with an outsider’s eye for paradox and an uncanny ability to miss the point altogether.
_Update_: I should add that I’m not taking Keillor’s review as gospel here. I’m a big fan of cross-national comparative work, but it’s hard to do it right. Keillor is pretty snide, and the substance of his criticism (that people over here are just ordinary, decent, straight-talking folks, working hard and doing the best they can, etc, etc) is itself a typically American trope. There’s a sub-Tocquevillean comparison to be made here, if we stretch things a bit. Lévy is a French writer and minor philosopher who behaves in the flamboyant manner of a major American media celebrity, while Keillor is a minor American media celebrity who would prefer to be taken seriously for his writing and down-home philosophy. So naturally they hate each other.
Here’s a bit of the McCall piece:
The cabin attendant on our Air Canada flight answers a request for the correct time in almost perfectly unaccented English. She will not be the last Canadian in this new Canada of hers to try meeting a question with an answer, to make her reply her way of dealing with a query…
The plane approaches the airport runway cautiously, as if the Canadian pilot were unwilling to risk landing until his airspeed was throttled back to almost nothing and his wheels were fully down.Everywhere the same gradations of blue and green and yellow and red and brown and orange and purple and taupe and mauve and pink and beige; city and countryside, summer and winter, in this new Canada, the only color is that of a single spectrum attempting to encompass all the hues of the rainbow…
In this land of the musk-ox, the beaver and the moose, there is no musk-ox or beaver or moose meat to be had. The man behind the counter at the meat store is little more than a butcher. The remains of cows and sheep and pigs are all he has to sell…
“They say we’ll get some rain today.” “They tell us you’re up here from the States, eh?” “They never let you park in that spot without a permit.” Who are “They,” who seem to know all, to control all, in this new Canada? The Canadian we ask blurts out the answer we expect. “I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about,” he sputters, careful to not look us straight in the eye.
The church, save for the minister, the choir, the sexton, and perhaps a hundred parishoners huddled in a space easily large enough to accommodate a hundred and thirty or more, is empty. The stone walls lack paint. Bits and pieces of colored glass serve as windows. Music is provided not by orchestra but by a lone pipe organ. Men shuffle among the worshippers solicting coins and paper currency—-anything anyone can afford to give. There is no talking, no playing checkers, no smoking allowed.
There are no schoolchildren with bouqets to see us of at the airport. Just as there had been no folk dancers to greet us when we arrived. This is the new Canada.
Tocqueville is a hard act to follow, and I can’t see BHL being up to the job.
{ 59 comments }
John Emerson 01.30.06 at 11:38 pm
I always wanted to write a travelogue beginning, “X is not a land of paradoxes. When you first arrive, with the expectations you’ve gleaned from your reading and anecdotes, it initially seems to be about what you’d expected; but the longer you stay there, the more you realize that X in fact is the way it is, and that everyone knows it is.”
X would probably be Belgium.
John Quiggin 01.31.06 at 12:30 am
In fairness (though I don’t know that BHL deserves this), it’s hard to avoid noticing fat people.
Frenchdoc 01.31.06 at 1:04 am
BHL has never written anything of value in French. Why should it be different in English? He’s a self-absorbed pompous gasbag that does not deserve the attention he gets… for chrissake, he was on the Daily Show the other night… i’m so disappointed in Jon Stewart *sigh*
Jim Harrison 01.31.06 at 1:27 am
Point of information. Does anybody take BHL seriously as a philosopher outside of French television? My impression is that he’s sort of an Ayn Rand type phemonemon.
Frenchdoc 01.31.06 at 1:57 am
Even French television does not take him seriously. He’s been the butt of jokes in the famous puppet show, “Les Guignols de l’Info” for years now.
Scott Martens 01.31.06 at 2:52 am
I’m not sure how seriously Levy is taken in France either. This guy seems to think people like Bill Kristol have their hearts in the right place – a conclusion that can only arise from a profound miscomprehension of American politics.
The urge to redo Tocqueville is insidious. America is not mysterious. It is not the promised land. It is not where the future is forged. It’s just a place where a bunch of people live. They may not live exactly the same way they do in France, but they don’t live they way they do on American TV either.
It’s kind of like that post a few weeks back about imaginary places. In Europe, people write books “interpreting” American society, writing into their take on America their own politics. The US is, especially for French intelletuals, a blank slate onto which they impose their own beliefs about the world. The idea that it’s a society that has to be understood on its own terms, just like some obscure Melanesian tribe, seems to elude them.
josh 01.31.06 at 2:55 am
Some people do take BHL at least somewhat seriously, as an intellectual if not as a philosopher. This is partly because, for all the bluster and blather, he has a disconcerting habit of every now and then taking positions that are controversial, and turn out (once his grandstanding is discounted) to be largely (sometimes importantly) right — viz his criticisms of then-dominant leftwing French intellectuals’ romance with the Soviet Union (or, possibly, his warnings about the need to support moderate Islam against violent fundamentalism back in the ’90s).
He does also say a lot of ridiculous things, of course.
His new book on America does sound pretty absurd. Then again, Keillor’s piece seemed to rely heavily on snidely expressed stereotypes of French intellectuals. He may have been trying to make a point about BHL’s stereotyping of Americans; but I just found it obnoxious, and found myself feeling some (unwarranted?) sympathy for BHL as a result.
Jim Harrison 01.31.06 at 3:14 am
I had a lot of contact with French intellectuals back in the early 70s. Some of them were virulent leftists, but I don’t recall anybody who had much use for the U.S.S.R. Of course it may have been an accident of sampling, but for the French guys I met the great battle over Stalin and the reality of Gulag had been over for quite a while. Which makes me wonder if BHL’s criticism of the pro-Russian attitudes of the lefties wasn’t a lot like Reagan’s denuciation of the evil empire, i.e. a brave gesture undertaken when it no longer took any courage at all.
bad Jim 01.31.06 at 3:29 am
On my last foray abroad I noticed a total of two extremely obese individuals in Vienna, a city not reknowned for the skinniness of its citizens. I saw four just in the Delta terminal at JFK, and I think two of them were on my flight to LAX. Obesity is just another fact of life in America, hardly remarkable any more.
The thing I found most fascinating about Lévy when I saw him on the Daily Show was his shirt, which was of a rather unusual cut.
daylight 01.31.06 at 3:43 am
“America is not mysterious. It is not the promised land. It is not where the future is forged. It’s just a place where a bunch of people live. They may not live exactly the same way they do in France, but they don’t live they way they do on American TV either.”
I think I disagree with all of that. America is deeply weird, and “just a place where a bunch of people live” is, I don’t know, like describing the savannah as a place where a couple animals live. But what animals! Zebras and giraffes and elephants, man!! Similarly, America *is* full of fat people. It’s full of gun owners. It’s full of high-minded idealists who pledge allegiance to a flag in school and are known to spout off about democracy over the dinner table, something civilized Europeans don’t much go for. It’s full of people who want to export democracy to benighted desert lands! You don’t think that’s the future being forged? A lotta dead Iraqis might like to debate that point with you. Not the promised land? Couple urchins in Istanbul backstreets I’d like you to meet. You don’t think America’s mysterious? Good Lord, what’s your standard for mystery then?
Keillor’s too snide, as Josh observed. BHL is, judging from excerpts, overblown and a little frivolous. That said, I’d love to see *more* such books written, not less. Vive les frogs.
Z 01.31.06 at 4:47 am
BHL in France is not completely discredited, though largely. Maybe it would be fair to compare him to Thomas Friedman.
Which makes me wonder if BHL’s criticism of the pro-Russian attitudes of the lefties wasn’t a lot like Reagan’s denuciation of the evil empire, i.e. a brave gesture undertaken when it no longer took any courage at all.
I think you are exactly right. And the same goes for his position on Algeria and Yougoslavia in the 90s: he has a knack for taking the uninformed, simplistic point of view that will be perfectly suited for an occasional opinion piece in a news magazine. OK, I have now devoted my yearly time to BHL, and will move on to more important things.
Nabakov 01.31.06 at 6:08 am
Balham: Gateway to the South
chris y 01.31.06 at 6:40 am
“America is not mysterious. It is not the promised land. It is not where the future is forged. It’s just a place where a bunch of people live. They may not live exactly the same way they do in France, but they don’t live they way they do on American TV either.â€
To balance Daylight above, I think this is one of the most important truths that needs to be disseminated at the moment. OK, the US is big and powerful and rich and tends to behave a lot like big, powerful, rich countries have done since the time of Sargon of Akkad, but why does that justify regarding Americans as a freakshow? It is not helpful to regard European society as some kind of norm against which all others can be measured. Would Daylight toss out the same sort of generalisations about Australians, or Brazilians?
If Europeans remain fixated with this idea of the States as TV show, they are playing the Bushies’ game for them.
Meanwhile, the future is probably being forged in India, while everybody is looking at China.
abb1 01.31.06 at 6:49 am
I think I disagree with all of that. America is deeply weird, and “just a place where a bunch of people live†is, I don’t know, like describing the savannah as a place where a couple animals live. But what animals! Zebras and giraffes and elephants, man!!
How about a compromise? Say, about 20-30% are zebras, giraffes and elephants – and the rest are common variety sheep, horses, pigs and cows?
True, you can find plenty of crackpots in New Hampshire, but if you live in Eastern Mass – it’s not really that exotic, no giraffes there.
daylight 01.31.06 at 7:09 am
“OK, the US is big and powerful and rich and tends to behave a lot like big, powerful, rich countries have done since the time of Sargon of Akkad, but why does that justify regarding Americans as a freakshow?”
Non sequitur there. Americans are regarded as a freakshow not because the US is big and powerful but because they behave strangely. Religious and nationalist, er, sorry, patriotic fervor being two traits that stick out.
I’m a Hoosier born and bred, though I live in England. Whenever I go back it seems to *me* that *my* family lives in a TV show. And I’ve got some epically fat relatives and and some gun-toting Texas preacher uncles, too. So to answer your question, no I wouldn’t toss out the same sorts of generalizations about Australians or Brazilians, ’cause I don’t know enough, but the whole freakshow thing, I’ll subscribe to, ’cause I’m one of the freaks.
Chris W. 01.31.06 at 7:24 am
BHL and his pals make their bed on deep-sounding drivel encased in admittedly complex syntax. BHL is a pure media product — telegenic, photogenic, always ready to enjoy the limelight. An academic philosopher he isn’t, and I’ve yet to see any thinker who takes him seriously. And I’m speaking of France here.
On the other hand, Garrison Keillor is annoying, too, when he confuses the writings of one pseudo-intellectual who does his “Tintin en Amérique” with “the French” (“Is this how the French talk or is it something they save for books about America?”). I mean, come on, guys.
des von bladet 01.31.06 at 7:37 am
Does nobody have even a good word for “Qui a tué Daniel Pearl ?†It got reasonable reviews in the Frenchy-French media, as I recall.
Scott Martens 01.31.06 at 7:43 am
Daylight, you’re hoosier, eh? You been up around Elkhart? Seen the horses and buggies and the ladies with little bonnets? Those are my people. I’ll take on anybody in a “my bit of America is weirder than yours” contest. (Although, to be totally honest, I am a Canadian, albeit one who has spent most of his life in the USA.)
Americans behave strangely to a lot of other folks, but this is not exactly unique to Americans. Explaining Europe to Chinese people is no less difficult a job than explaining America to them, and much harder than explaining Europe to Americans or vice-versa.
And, I live in Belgium: The Future Home of the Anti-Christ. Europe has been transformed from a political project unifying states with at least superficially similar structures into an expansive ideology on par with American notions about “exporting democracy”. This is the singularly most important political fact on the contentent since the fall of the Soviet Union. If Europeans do not as often reify some poorly explained conception of democracy as a project for export to the global masses, it is because it is already included in a far more pervasive product line which, from the number of countries begging for admission to European institutions, seems to have found a market.
America is not a freakshow, or at least, no more so than France. You should see the French version of Jerry Springer. If there was an Olympics for cultural freakiness, I doubt America would take any disproportionate number of medals (outside, perhaps, the “dumbest elected leadership” category).
John Quiggin 01.31.06 at 7:48 am
“Would Daylight toss out the same sort of generalisations about Australians, or Brazilians?”
I don’t know about Daylight, or about Brazilians, but generalizations about Australians bearing little resemblance to reality are par for the course.
Gotta go now, the crocs are biting …
Kieran Healy 01.31.06 at 8:00 am
Gotta go now, the crocs are biting …
Don’t forget to bring your akubra hat with the corks in it.
Daniel 01.31.06 at 8:36 am
Does nobody have even a good word for “Qui a tué Daniel Pearl ?â€
“Shit” is a fine old English word.
It’s pure and simple a piece of conspiracy theory with all the advantages and disadvantages of the genre. Fair do’s to the guy that he did some worthwhile investigation and reporting, but he spins it into a vast heap of conjecture which actually makes it harder to work out what the hell was going on. It was a much less scrupulous book than, for example, Jim Keith’s “Black Helicopters Over America”.
KCinDC 01.31.06 at 8:36 am
The McCall piece reminds me of “People Like Us”.
Tad Brennan 01.31.06 at 8:37 am
No insight here, just wanted to say: those snippets of the McCall piece are first-rate. Perfect pitch, and very funny.
Timothy Burke 01.31.06 at 8:39 am
I read the Atlantic Monthly‘s excerpts of BHL’s book. I thought it was absolutely shit, which had nothing to do with any particular claims about the United States. I didn’t think there were any claims about the United States to respond to, just a bunch of off-the-shelf banalites wrapped up in about ten tons of self-congratulatory pomposity.
nvb 01.31.06 at 8:52 am
Keiran wrote:
“the substance of his criticism (that people over here are just ordinary, decent, straight-talking folks, working hard and doing the best they can, etc, etc) is itself a typically American trope”
I’m neither a Keillor fan nor a francophobe, but I don’t think this is Keillor’s point at all. It is that BHL makes the same mistake that most tourists make, confusing the surface for the reality. BHL’s obilgatory stops (c.f., Beaudrillard’s “America”) are straight out of the tour book and the observations can’t but be banal and obvious. Keillor’s penultimate line – “For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was that all about? – makes the point of his critique perfectly clear.
John Isbell 01.31.06 at 9:04 am
Say what you will, BHL has great hair.
Steve LaBonne 01.31.06 at 9:24 am
Yes, I also read the chunks of BHL’s stuff that were published in the Atlantic and I can vouch for the fact that it was pure Bruce McCall all the way.
Cranky Observer 01.31.06 at 9:38 am
> Religious and nationalist, er, sorry, patriotic
> fervor being two traits that stick out.
Compared to Europe in the 1700s? Compared to much of Africa today? Much as I am annoyed (and worried) about features of current US society let’s not go too far.
> X would probably be Belgium.
Well, I at least was surprised to find that Belgium has the best pizza of any country I have visited yet, although my travels in Italy have admittedly been limited. So there was one unexpected thing anyway.
Cranky
Matt McIrvin 01.31.06 at 9:39 am
The comparison to Australians may be particularly apropos: If you believe that World Values Survey that somebody here linked to a while back, Americans, Australians and Canadians are like peas in a pod, regardless of how different they may regard their values as being.
Britons are a little bit different in their attitudes, but not as much as you’d think: the Anglosphere functions as a sort of values bloc, and I’m tempted to say (admittedly without much evidence) that the middle of the bloc where the US, Canada and Australia roughly sit represents the free evolution of some old British Empire norm from which modern Britain is getting pulled by modern pan-European cultural influence.
If you encounter the differences in your daily life, it might well be easier to notice them. (I myself regard the similarity between the US and Canada as surprising, probably because some Canadians make such a point of regarding Americans as crazy scary freaks who don’t think like human beings, and some Americans like to crow about Soviet Canuckistan. But other cases of the fetishization of small differences between nearby tribes come to mind.)
Matt McIrvin 01.31.06 at 9:50 am
Also, Garrison Keillor irritates me too; his show has always struck me as this weird mechanism for highly educated, upper-middle-class, liberal NPR listeners to convince themselves that they’re in touch with the common folk and indulge in the cultural nostalgia usually reserved for political conservatives. To the extent that it keeps educated liberals from becoming completely alienated and just giving up on the US, I suppose that’s valuable, but something about it rubs me the wrong way.
garymar 01.31.06 at 9:53 am
Similarly to Keillor vs BHL, Mary McCarthy blasted Simone Beauvoir as a highbrow tourist in Mlle. Gulliver en Amériqueâ€.
Dignan 01.31.06 at 10:15 am
Thought you might like our take on BHL.
John Emerson 01.31.06 at 10:16 am
Canada is America without the South. That’s a big “without”, though.
Frenchdoc 01.31.06 at 10:42 am
you guys are trying too hard. Every BHL book is first and foremost about BHL. As someone mentioned above, the guy is a media product… the shirt… the hair. It’s all part of a carefully constructed image supposed to distract from the low-grade content.
I’m sure Kieran could get us to discuss better books.
Ponte 01.31.06 at 11:40 am
Not only does BHL have good hair, it appears that he waxes his chest.
M. Homais 01.31.06 at 11:50 am
Mark Twain dealt with the same phenomenon 101 years ago in his essay “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us.”
marcel 01.31.06 at 1:17 pm
abb1 (January 31st, 2006 at 6:49 am) wrote:
True, you can find plenty of crackpots in New Hampshire, but if you live in Eastern Mass – it’s not really that exotic, no giraffes there.
As a denizen of NH, I take exception to his. Seems to me that there are plenty of crackpots in eastern MA; the leaders of 2 well-known educational institutions on opposite sides of the Charles, if not giraffes, certainly come across as rhinoceri.
abb1 01.31.06 at 1:23 pm
Lol. Fair enough, Marcel, but not necessarily from the pov of a French intellectual…
Donald Johnson 01.31.06 at 1:50 pm
I have no sympathy for BHL, from what little I know of him, but I thought Keillor was the liberal playing the American jingoist in one or two spots. Liberals do that sometimes, to make themselves feel like they’re part of the heartland, you know. (As someone pointed out above). The line about the French riots, to me, was moronic. BHL is one guy and the fact that he wrote a stupid book tells me nothing about France and shouldn’t be an excuse for sounding like a typical commentator on Fox News.
SqueakyRat 01.31.06 at 2:00 pm
I read somewhere about a headline referring to BHL: “God is dead, but my hair is perfect.”
Walt Pohl 01.31.06 at 2:02 pm
Donald: I read it as that Keillor was imitating Levy’s technique of writing about a foreign country.
yabonn 01.31.06 at 2:37 pm
Well, Keillor’s french, er, humor is a bit on the unpleasant side. But nastier than the average “mainstream” opinion piece on france? I don’t know.
And he mocks BHL, which is a big plus.
About the u.s. being weird at 13 :
but why does that justify regarding Americans as a freakshow? It is not helpful to regard European society as some kind of norm against which all others can be measured.
Funny you should mention that. A little bit after bush’s reelection, i took the opposite way : what if i apply the european standards to all this? Wouldn’t it be the best thing to do after all?
I must admit that a certain souring ensued. If anyone has a way out of this, let me know.
helmut 01.31.06 at 3:38 pm
I like Keillor better than BHL, and don’t really care about defending BHL. But one question the comments raise for me is this: anyone here ever read BHL? Yes, he’s mocked on “Les Guignols,” but so is everyone else, so that’s not saying much.
Everybody loves to make fun of BHL because he goes overboard on the dashing Left Bank intellectual bit. He is indeed a media celebrity in France, but a sharper one than almost all of the US’ media celebrities. But his book “Barbarism with a Human Face” was also quite influential. His “Adventures on the Freedom Road” is an erudite and massive history of French flirting with totalitarianism. His “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?” is a better read than most of the infinite stream of current events best-sellers at B&N.
Too much bandwagoning going on here…. Yeah, yeah, French arrogance, poofsterness, etc. Kind of like a French person commenting on American obesity.
I’ll take a media-celebrity philosopher in the public eye any day over paid talking-points minstrels, barkers, and screamers.
Catherine Liu 01.31.06 at 3:58 pm
I just read a review of American Vertigo and I can’t find it right now. It might have been in The Nation (sorry, but I couldn’t find it on-line), but I think the most remarkable thing that the reviewer pointed out was the BHL’s idea of an average Californian whose bead he would like to isolate — is Sharon Stone.
Also remarkably, like most of his former Parisian Maoist pals who believe that minorities are purely decorative, and so although there is some sort of apologia at the end of the book for its white on white coverage, it seems to miss a huge chunk of the US — including the poor, who are also often fat. I’m in middle of teaching and I don’t have time to pick up these sorts of books, even for fun.
Keillor is an inadequate critic and mediocre writer– the deep thinker from MInnesota can appeal to any lazy populist sensibility, but when I lived there, his smugness literally drove me to fantasies, not acts (because I’m well repressed) of violence.
In fact, the aw shucks I’m just an American business is a mask for pure resentment.
Take my word for it.
John Quiggin 01.31.06 at 4:05 pm
“Don’t forget to bring your akubra hat with the corks in it.”
Embarrassingly enough, I actually had one of these once, as a child. That was before Aerogard.
Tom 01.31.06 at 4:09 pm
Levy accuses Keillor of Francophobia in the New York Sun today. He also says the book was written to combat pernicious continental anti-Americanism. It doesn’t sound like he and Keillor are talking about the same book.
jamie 01.31.06 at 4:32 pm
May I throw this into the BHL mix?
http://www.jaybabcock.com/observer.html
Which also rather neatly confirms the weirdness of Belgium.
yabonn 01.31.06 at 5:19 pm
Which also rather neatly confirms the weirdness of Belgium.
Belgium simply rocks, all hail Godin.
He got B. Gates’ whole bodyguards team fired last time (it is rumored), but i like him better for his repeated BHL pieings.
BHL’s face and cream pies, it’s just magic, really.
helmut 01.31.06 at 6:47 pm
Noel Godin’s interest in new and more prestigious victims must, I supposed, have taken the heat off his old enemy Bernard-Henri Levy. “Sadly not,” said Godin. “I offered my terms for a ceasefire several months ago. Hostilities will end when he and his wife appear in public and sing, as a duet, the popular French comic song “Avez-Vous Vu Le Beau Chapeau De Zozo?”.
But… I’m all for pieing BHL. Keillor too. Maybe Bono? All of Oasis?
rea 01.31.06 at 7:04 pm
Those cheese-eating surrender monkeys sure seem to accept a lot of misleading and supeficial stereotypes about Americans, don’t they? ;)
John Emerson 01.31.06 at 7:06 pm
Sorry, Belgium still is not a land of paradoxes.
Neither is New Zealand.
Frenchdoc 01.31.06 at 7:39 pm
From a french perspective, BHL is NOT a huge celebrity. His heyday was 25 years ago(along with the other so-called “new philophers”, a movement launched by editor Francoise Verny, Barbarism with a human face was part of that trend).
It’s been downward ever since. He made a movie that bombed at the box-office. as mentioned above, he got pied pretty consistently. And his recent books, including “who killed Daniel PEarl” were all convincingly debunked. He is by no means representative of the intellectual french scene. For more interesting work, look for Olivier Roy, Gilles Kepel, and Alain Touraine. Whether you agree with them or not, they have more intellectual breadth and depth and know what they’re talking about.
Tom T. 01.31.06 at 7:51 pm
Slate’s discussion of Levy points out that he is apparently a fan of Francis Fukuyama. That’s all I needed to know.
Matt 01.31.06 at 8:59 pm
I was all excited to find out what this akubra hat thing was, but it turns out just to be what the Man from Snowy River wore. The cork part is pretty weird, though. No way the Man from Snowy River would wear those- he’d just kill the flies w/ his whip.
dr ngo 02.01.06 at 12:53 am
Akubra is a hat _company_, like Stetson. They traditionally made the best Australian hats (from rabbit felt, IIRC), which come in various models. My favorite, the “Snowy River” model, I unfortunately left in the airport at Bangkok returning from a trip with the Hong Kong Welsh Male Voice Choir. (I’m not making this up, you know.) I now have the “Cattleman” model, equally well made, but less stylish. (One Ozzie friend said the “Snowy River” model made me look “as rakish as a rat with a gold tooth,” but I’m not sure she was serious.)
The Akubra does not come with corks on strings, which, if wanted, must be designed and attached by the wearer. But it’s a great hat, nevertheless!
nick s 02.01.06 at 2:41 am
I thought Keillor let himself down a bit: one would have presumed that, as a NYT book reviewer, he might have realised the extent to which BHL has responded to his lampooning in France by becoming a self-parody for the benefit of Americans.
Now, it’s interesting that GK is himself a purveyor of Minnesota Lutheran stereotypes (‘Lake Wobegone… where all the children are above average’) though with some degree of tweaking and subtlety.
Here’s an odd compare-and-contrast, though: BHL’s C-SPAN thing this weekend — where he was introduced by Fukuyama and shared a stage with Bill Kristol — reminded me of Niall Ferguson, both of whom appear to have taken advantage of an unfamiliar nation to reinvent themselves as doyennes of the neocon (i.e. AEI/Hoover) rubber-chicken circuit. It’s a bit like Hollywood celebs doing Japanese TV commercials and posing for billboard ads selling low-rent products.
The thing I found most fascinating about Lévy when I saw him on the Daily Show was his shirt, which was of a rather unusual cut.
There is something earlier in the C-SPAN archives where his shirt is unbuttoned to the navel, revealing a large gold medallion. Quite. My wife still can’t get the image out of her head.
John Quiggin 02.01.06 at 3:38 am
(One Ozzie friend said the “Snowy River†model made me look “as rakish as a rat with a gold tooth,†but I’m not sure she was serious.)
You mean “as flash as a rat with a gold tooth”. An apt description of BHL, as is the suggestion that commonly follows, that he has tickets on himself.
david tiley 02.01.06 at 5:39 am
All done up like a pox doctor’s clerk.
That’s the drum.
Mr Ripley 02.01.06 at 5:15 pm
I wonder what Keillor thinks of (fellow public radio populist) Codrescu’s Road Scholar, which has some of the same stops he describes as clichés in Levy, albeit a rather different tone and approach.
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