ED CURTIN—Outwardly at least, the story Naipaul tells in The Enigma of Arrival is impersonal, slow-paced and almost boring in its progression (much like ordinary life). After twenty years in England – “savorless and much of it mean” – having failed in his effort to leave England with its history of colonial exploitation and become “a free man,” his spirit broken and his nerves shattered, he settles in a “cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past” on the Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge.
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MORRIS BERMAN—That Francis Fukuyama could write a book around that time called The End of History and be a professor at a major university has got to be the most laughable thing imaginable. (Don’t get me started on the degradation of American higher education. Jesus, talk about decline!) As though history could end! What a dummy! One of the things I’ve argued is that there is a lot of stupidity in the United States, and it includes large numbers of people with high IQs. There are people running around with high IQs – David Brooks, for example – who are in fact little more than bad jokes, and yet are worshipped as sages. Fukuyama is a good example of this.
So, what have you got? You’ve got a deep systemic emptiness. This comes from the fact – in the case of consumerism, capitalism and so on – that you’ve embraced an ideology without knowing it’s an ideology, whose basic philosophy is “more.”
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P. GREANVILE—bserve closely and try to see what these rituals tell you about a culture. In some cases, you will be surprised. My own impression is that the Greeks show the influence of the Turks, while the US—amazing for its surprising sheer weirdness— approximates that of a real automaton. Meanwhile, the Taiwanese excel in precision movements, while the Indo-Pakistani, mirroring their legendary enmity, indulge in a male display of mock ferocity on steroids that borders on the comical. Note traces of the British influence in their high stepping and arm movements.
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HIROYUKI HAMADA—People sometimes ask me what religion Japanese people practice. I usually end up saying that Japanese people aren’t very religious at all. But paradoxically, if you go to Japan, you encounter huge shrines at tourists’ spots and there are numerous smaller ones across the country in many forms. You visit a Japanese household, you might also find a shrine, a box shaped prayer spot, called butsudan.
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ANDREW KORYBKO—
Mexico is therefore in a conundrum because it must urgently deal with the cartels yet there’s no perfect solution for doing so, as the existing “hard” policy has evidently failed while the “soft” one could amount to surrendering the state to their clutches. These groups are also much too enticing of a lever of possible influence against the Mexican government for US intelligence agencies to willingly abandon them, especially since they might one day want to exploit them as Hybrid War instruments against AMLO if his foreign policy becomes too multipolar.
