A good, thought-provoking appreciation of C.S. Lewis in of all places, The New York Times on the 40th anniversary of his death.
November 22, 2003
A Mind That Grasped Both Heaven and Hell
By JOSEPH LOCONTE
WASHINGTON
Forty years ago today, as the world mourned the assassination of an American president, the passing of the 20th century's most influential Christian writer was hardly noticed: Clive Staples Lewis, professor of English literature at Oxford and Cambridge, died on Nov. 22, 1963. In his ability to nurture the faithful, as well as seduce the skeptic, C. S. Lewis had no peer.
Lewis was an atheist for much of his adult life, an experience that may have helped immunize him from the religious cliché, the reluctance to ask hard questions, the self-righteousness of the zealot. "Mr. Lewis possesses the rare gift," according to an early reviewer, "of being able to make righteousness readable." Lewis was not a theologian, but he expressed even the most difficult religious concepts with bracing clarity. He was not a preacher, yet his essays and novels pierce the heart with their nobility and tenderness.
The lessons found within his writings continue to resonate today. In fact, it's hard to imagine a time when the need for sane thinking about religion was more momentous. Cite an act of terror, from the sniper shootings in Washington to the bombings in Baghdad and Istanbul, and faith is close at hand. Many are now tempted to equate piety with venality — or worse — and it's here that Lewis may have the most to teach us.
Born in 1898, Lewis reached maturity in the 1930's, when Europe was being convulsed by the rise of new tyrannies: communism in Russia and fascism in Spain, Italy and Germany. At the same time, trends in psychology and theology were discrediting Christian doctrines of sin and repentance. The "root causes" of international disorder were said to be social and political arrangements, like runaway capitalism or the flawed Treaty of Versailles. But Lewis, like his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, knew the trouble lay deeper, and marshaled his literary imagination to explore it.
In a harrowing scene from his science fiction novel "Perelandra," the protagonist, Prof. Elwin Ransom, battles a mad scientist horribly disfigured by his lust for power. Lewis writes: "What was before him appeared no longer a creature of corrupted will. It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an instrument." The Christians, Lewis argued, were right: the mystery of evil was rooted in the tragedy of human nature. Pride, and the poisoned conscience it created, functioned as the engine of the world's woes. Unchallenged, it led to a "ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self, which is the mark of Hell."
Many modern liberals dismiss Lewis's concept of the diabolical as a "medieval" superstition. Yet many religious conservatives seem to make evil the brainchild of God himself. For them, all individual and social sin — including the terror of Sept. 11 — is the perfect will of a Divine Judge (as the Rev. Jerry Falwell claimed at the time). Lewis disagreed: Evil is always man's doing, yet it is never his destiny. The power of choice makes evil possible, but it's also "the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having."
While Oxford agnostics howled, Lewis gave BBC talks on theology that were a national sensation. Even his beloved children's stories, "The Chronicles of Narnia," ring with biblical themes of sin and redemption. No one did more to make "the repellent doctrines" of Christianity plausible to modern ears.
Nevertheless, Lewis acknowledged that religion easily becomes a device to exploit others — sometimes, as in the case of sexually abusive priests, at the very steps of the altar. The pretense of piety, he said, has left a record of violence that should shame every honest believer. "Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst," he wrote in "Reflections on the Psalms."
Yet, unlike the cynic, Lewis refused to blame the faith itself for the shortcomings of the church. Instead, his writings offer bright glimpses into the moral beauty of divine goodness, what Lewis called "the weight of glory." It is this vision of the Holy, he observed, that has produced many of the masterpieces of art and music. This same vision motivates the faithful to risk everything to relieve the world's suffering: caring for plague victims, defending the rights of children, guiding slaves to freedom, breaching war zones to feed the poor.
"If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next," he wrote in "Mere Christianity," one of his best-known works. "It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this." In an era when God himself seems to be on trial, that's a timely message — for the half-hearted pilgrim as well as the devoted doubter. Probably just what C. S. Lewis had in mind.
Joseph Loconte, religion fellow at the Heritage Foundation, is editor of the forthcoming "The End of Illusions: America's Churches and Hitler's Gathering Storm, 1938-41.''
Friday, November 28, 2003
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
An excellent quote from an interview with Jamie Glazov on Front Page.
"At Solovki, one of earliest Gulag camps, Soviet administrators put up a sign that expressed the Communist program: "With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness." That slogan captures the murderous nature of the utopian vision of the hard left."
-John Earl Haynes
"At Solovki, one of earliest Gulag camps, Soviet administrators put up a sign that expressed the Communist program: "With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness." That slogan captures the murderous nature of the utopian vision of the hard left."
-John Earl Haynes
Who's Right?
By Brian C. Anderson Published 11/25/2003
My recent City Journal cover story, "We're Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore," has generated a lot of attention: it has been excerpted in the Los Angeles Times, written about by John Leo in U.S. News & World Report, re-posted by OpinionJournal and Frontpage, linked by AndrewSullivan, NationalReviewOnline, FreeRepublic, Tech Central Station, and scores of other sites, and has had me blabbing away to any number of talk radio hosts over the last couple of weeks. It's pretty clear my argument -- that, thanks to cable television (Fox News and a kind of anarchic anti-liberal comedic spirit in a lot of cable comedy, including South Park), the blogosphere, and a big shift in publishing, the Left's near-monopoly over the institutions of opinion and information is swiftly breaking down -- has struck a nerve. Two critical responses to the article, liberal Timothy Noah's on Slate and conservative Jonah Goldberg's on NRO, raise some interesting questions that deserve a response.
Noah reads my piece (and a New York Sun adaptation of it) against the backdrop of CBS's cancellation of "The Reagans" as saying: "Hooray, the right is winning the culture wars!" It's about time, Noah thinks: "Within the cultural sphere, liberalism has been in retreat for a good quarter-century." Liberalism's definitive "defeat" occurred sometime between 1985, when Rambo II re-fought the Vietnam War, and 1992, when Rush Limbaugh's The Way Things Ought to Be "hijacked the New York Times bestseller list." No one, he asserts, can plausibly claim that liberals continue to exert greater influence than conservatives over the culture; kudos to Anderson for belatedly admitting it.
Well, as I replied to Noah in an interesting discussion on NPR the other day, hold on a sec. My article clearly states that the Right (broadly construed to include conservatives and libertarians) is no longer losing the culture wars, not that it has won it, and that's a very different thing. After all, the developments I describe in my article are quite new -- the blogosphere, for example, has only been around a few years -- and they remain overmatched by liberals' continuing influence over mainstream media outlets, from the networks to the New York Times and most major metropolitan dailies (to say nothing of the universities, which, as Noah admitted on NPR, are a left-wing preserve, or the courts). I'm far from ready to claim victory, or even to say the Right is winning. Noah's assessment says more about his pessimism than my optimism.
My friend Jonah Goldberg, conversely, criticizes me from the Right -- or better, he criticizes the enthusiastic response of many conservatives to my article, "a great deal" of which he agrees with. "Considering how many folks on the web have touted Anderson's article as something of a manifesto or watershed," he says, "it might be worth making a few contrary points."
His first criticism is to say that no watershed has been reached. Things are still pretty dark for the Right, Goldberg claims. While Fox and NRO are great things for conservatives, he observes, "the tools at our disposal are still far, far less potent than the tools in the Left's utility belt." Don't think so, asks Goldberg? Then let's trade: the Left can have Fox News, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the offices of National Review and The Weekly Standard, and Rush Limbaugh's airtime; the Right will get ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the schools, and so on. In his view, the new media I tout are at best fighting a guerrilla war against a massive, super-powerful army. His second point is to warn against mistaking an anti-PC spirit for conservatism. Perhaps that's more a sign of the Left's exhaustion, he says, than the Right's ascendancy.
If Noah overstates the influence of the new Right media, I think Goldberg may be a bit too unimpressed by it -- including his own stellar achievement with NRO. One thing Goldberg doesn't really get into is the trends at work here, which I think favor conservatives.
Take Fox News, which features a lot more rightish voices on air than any other news show or network. Sure, Fox, as I point out in my article, still has fewer viewers than the network broadcasts. But its audience has been steadily growing, while the networks are hemorrhaging viewers. Moreover, unlike (thankfully) the networks, Fox is broadcasting news all day, and presumably it's not all the same two or three million wingers watching Linda Vester in the afternoon and Hannity and Colmes at night. So the total daily Fox viewership probably comes much closer to or surpasses that of any one nightly network news program. (This would gel with a recent Pew Research finding that 22 percent of all Americans now get most of their news from Fox; the combined total for the three networks was 32 percent.) Fox's success is also encouraging other cable news stations like MSNBC to try to give the Right a fair shake. It's doubtful former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough would have his own news and opinion hour if Fox wasn't drawing so many viewers.
Goldberg doesn't discuss the seismic shift in publishing that I highlight in my article. But it's a pretty big deal. When in American publishing history have there been so many right-leaning bestsellers? If you go into a Barnes & Noble, you'll see piles of National Review editor Rich Lowry's excellent new book on the Clinton years, Victor David Hanson's latest, flamethrower titles by Ann Coulter and others, and much more. As a bookstore hound, I can tell you: it wasn't like this just a couple of years ago. And with two big new conservative imprints launching from Random House and Penguin, there will be even more such titles hitting the market soon. If books have any influence, this has to count for something.
As for the influence of right-leaning blogs, it's significant and growing. Goldberg thinks that that influence is small peanuts compared with that of the New York Times. Probably true. Yet according to a recent poll, less than 50 percent of the American people now consider the Times a trustworthy source of news (72 percent find Fox News reliable) -- and that dismissive attitude, I believe, has a lot to do with the unremitting Internet-led criticism of the "paper of record's" liberal biases (nowhere more unremitting than on NRO, which draws a million-plus visitors a month). Several prominent people who've talked with me about my article privately have said that blogger Andrew Sullivan is today the most influential intellectual in the public arena. I'm inclined to agree. What person working in news journalism today doesn't look in on Sullivan or other influential web sites regularly? Even new Times boss Bill Keller admits to it.
Finally, I agree with Goldberg that the anarchic anti-liberal humor of South Park and other cable comedy shows is not a sign that the culture wars have been won by the Right. (Indeed, some conservatives have roundly denounced South Park for its profanity.) But at the same time, I think it expresses a striking new attitude among the young that will have long-term political and cultural implications. Younger Americans are trending to the Right, supporting the Bush administration and the Iraq War at higher levels than their elders, for instance, and comfortable with much greater restrictions on abortion, too. It's worth noting that Fox News and the right-leaning blogosphere are doing particularly well in attracting a younger demographic. If people get more conservative as they get older and have kids and start making some money, where are these kids going to be when they're 40? I doubt many of them will be voting for the Democratic Party.
In sum, while Goldberg is correct that the Right has a long way to go in fighting the culture wars, I think the emergence of a conservative media sphere is both broadening the national debate and helping to push the nation in a more conservative direction.
Brian C. Anderson is senior editor of City Journal.
By Brian C. Anderson Published 11/25/2003
My recent City Journal cover story, "We're Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore," has generated a lot of attention: it has been excerpted in the Los Angeles Times, written about by John Leo in U.S. News & World Report, re-posted by OpinionJournal and Frontpage, linked by AndrewSullivan, NationalReviewOnline, FreeRepublic, Tech Central Station, and scores of other sites, and has had me blabbing away to any number of talk radio hosts over the last couple of weeks. It's pretty clear my argument -- that, thanks to cable television (Fox News and a kind of anarchic anti-liberal comedic spirit in a lot of cable comedy, including South Park), the blogosphere, and a big shift in publishing, the Left's near-monopoly over the institutions of opinion and information is swiftly breaking down -- has struck a nerve. Two critical responses to the article, liberal Timothy Noah's on Slate and conservative Jonah Goldberg's on NRO, raise some interesting questions that deserve a response.
Noah reads my piece (and a New York Sun adaptation of it) against the backdrop of CBS's cancellation of "The Reagans" as saying: "Hooray, the right is winning the culture wars!" It's about time, Noah thinks: "Within the cultural sphere, liberalism has been in retreat for a good quarter-century." Liberalism's definitive "defeat" occurred sometime between 1985, when Rambo II re-fought the Vietnam War, and 1992, when Rush Limbaugh's The Way Things Ought to Be "hijacked the New York Times bestseller list." No one, he asserts, can plausibly claim that liberals continue to exert greater influence than conservatives over the culture; kudos to Anderson for belatedly admitting it.
Well, as I replied to Noah in an interesting discussion on NPR the other day, hold on a sec. My article clearly states that the Right (broadly construed to include conservatives and libertarians) is no longer losing the culture wars, not that it has won it, and that's a very different thing. After all, the developments I describe in my article are quite new -- the blogosphere, for example, has only been around a few years -- and they remain overmatched by liberals' continuing influence over mainstream media outlets, from the networks to the New York Times and most major metropolitan dailies (to say nothing of the universities, which, as Noah admitted on NPR, are a left-wing preserve, or the courts). I'm far from ready to claim victory, or even to say the Right is winning. Noah's assessment says more about his pessimism than my optimism.
My friend Jonah Goldberg, conversely, criticizes me from the Right -- or better, he criticizes the enthusiastic response of many conservatives to my article, "a great deal" of which he agrees with. "Considering how many folks on the web have touted Anderson's article as something of a manifesto or watershed," he says, "it might be worth making a few contrary points."
His first criticism is to say that no watershed has been reached. Things are still pretty dark for the Right, Goldberg claims. While Fox and NRO are great things for conservatives, he observes, "the tools at our disposal are still far, far less potent than the tools in the Left's utility belt." Don't think so, asks Goldberg? Then let's trade: the Left can have Fox News, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the offices of National Review and The Weekly Standard, and Rush Limbaugh's airtime; the Right will get ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the schools, and so on. In his view, the new media I tout are at best fighting a guerrilla war against a massive, super-powerful army. His second point is to warn against mistaking an anti-PC spirit for conservatism. Perhaps that's more a sign of the Left's exhaustion, he says, than the Right's ascendancy.
If Noah overstates the influence of the new Right media, I think Goldberg may be a bit too unimpressed by it -- including his own stellar achievement with NRO. One thing Goldberg doesn't really get into is the trends at work here, which I think favor conservatives.
Take Fox News, which features a lot more rightish voices on air than any other news show or network. Sure, Fox, as I point out in my article, still has fewer viewers than the network broadcasts. But its audience has been steadily growing, while the networks are hemorrhaging viewers. Moreover, unlike (thankfully) the networks, Fox is broadcasting news all day, and presumably it's not all the same two or three million wingers watching Linda Vester in the afternoon and Hannity and Colmes at night. So the total daily Fox viewership probably comes much closer to or surpasses that of any one nightly network news program. (This would gel with a recent Pew Research finding that 22 percent of all Americans now get most of their news from Fox; the combined total for the three networks was 32 percent.) Fox's success is also encouraging other cable news stations like MSNBC to try to give the Right a fair shake. It's doubtful former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough would have his own news and opinion hour if Fox wasn't drawing so many viewers.
Goldberg doesn't discuss the seismic shift in publishing that I highlight in my article. But it's a pretty big deal. When in American publishing history have there been so many right-leaning bestsellers? If you go into a Barnes & Noble, you'll see piles of National Review editor Rich Lowry's excellent new book on the Clinton years, Victor David Hanson's latest, flamethrower titles by Ann Coulter and others, and much more. As a bookstore hound, I can tell you: it wasn't like this just a couple of years ago. And with two big new conservative imprints launching from Random House and Penguin, there will be even more such titles hitting the market soon. If books have any influence, this has to count for something.
As for the influence of right-leaning blogs, it's significant and growing. Goldberg thinks that that influence is small peanuts compared with that of the New York Times. Probably true. Yet according to a recent poll, less than 50 percent of the American people now consider the Times a trustworthy source of news (72 percent find Fox News reliable) -- and that dismissive attitude, I believe, has a lot to do with the unremitting Internet-led criticism of the "paper of record's" liberal biases (nowhere more unremitting than on NRO, which draws a million-plus visitors a month). Several prominent people who've talked with me about my article privately have said that blogger Andrew Sullivan is today the most influential intellectual in the public arena. I'm inclined to agree. What person working in news journalism today doesn't look in on Sullivan or other influential web sites regularly? Even new Times boss Bill Keller admits to it.
Finally, I agree with Goldberg that the anarchic anti-liberal humor of South Park and other cable comedy shows is not a sign that the culture wars have been won by the Right. (Indeed, some conservatives have roundly denounced South Park for its profanity.) But at the same time, I think it expresses a striking new attitude among the young that will have long-term political and cultural implications. Younger Americans are trending to the Right, supporting the Bush administration and the Iraq War at higher levels than their elders, for instance, and comfortable with much greater restrictions on abortion, too. It's worth noting that Fox News and the right-leaning blogosphere are doing particularly well in attracting a younger demographic. If people get more conservative as they get older and have kids and start making some money, where are these kids going to be when they're 40? I doubt many of them will be voting for the Democratic Party.
In sum, while Goldberg is correct that the Right has a long way to go in fighting the culture wars, I think the emergence of a conservative media sphere is both broadening the national debate and helping to push the nation in a more conservative direction.
Brian C. Anderson is senior editor of City Journal.
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
11/24/2003: SHOW ME THE MONEY! (updated)
If Iraq were the Czech Republic... something of stretch, to put it mildly, but still... just as the great Vaclav Havel was the first president of a liberated Czechoslovakia (soon to be the Czech Republic), Kanan Makiya would be an excellent first president of a Free Iraq. His actions and his writings have been truly courageous.
Now the professor has set about memorializing the activities of the Baath Party with two and half million (!) party documents piled up in his old family house in Baghdad. Not surprisingly, according to a New York Times article this morning, these papers reveal that many of these tortures and assasinations were fueled by money... and plenty of it.
As Instapundit notes, this must be "making people nervous." Nervous, indeed! My question is--where did this money come from? Where did Saddam get the moolah to reward his henchmen for dragging his fellow Iraqis through the streets or dropping them in shredders? I'm not going to say right now it came straight from the UN Oil-for-Food program, but WHERE IS THAT MONEY? Why haven't Kofi Annan et al produced the files? Until they do, there is a taint on the UN of tragic proportions, as far as I am concerned. And where is the media in all this? The Times article this morning by Joel Brinkley was a good start, but there is a monumental story here waiting to be told. Were France, Germany and Russia all feeding this totalitarian homicide machine--those same people who attack us for trying to put a stop it? We have a right to know!
UPDATE: Gerard Van Der Leun has an answer.
The Terrorist Money Trail Passes Through Paris and Bonn
ROGER SIMON asks about the financing of Saddam's terror in: SHOW ME THE MONEY!
My question is--where did this money come from? Where did Saddam get the moolah to reward his henchmen for dragging his fellow Iraqis through the streets or dropping them in shredders? I'm not going to say right now it came straight from the UN Oil-for-Food program, but WHERE IS THAT MONEY?
Yes, where is that UN money? Perhaps it went back to the same FOUNTAIN OF FUNDING for the Masters of Terror the world over, the French and German banks.
Yesterday, in the Wall St Journal, Michael Gonzalez wrote: Vive Le Checkbook [It's available to subscribers only, so I'll just reprint a couple of indicative paragraphs.]
"Follow the money" is an old adage, and it means that economic interest will eventually explain much human behavior. That France opposed the removal of Saddam Hussein because he owed millions to French banks is proof of this. Less well known, but much more troubling, are key French financial links with other U.S. enemies. They raise the belief that the Franco-American conflict over Iraq was just one slice of the action. For France was not just Baathist Iraq's largest contributor of funds; French banks have financed other odious regimes. They are the No. 1 lenders to Iran and Cuba and past and present U.S. foes such as Somalia, Sudan and Vietnam.
This type of financing is shared by Germany, France's partner. German banks are North Korea's biggest lenders, and Syria's -- and Libya's. But France is the most active. In Castro's sizzling gulag, French banks plunked down $549 million in the first trimester this year, a third of all credit to Cuba. The figure for Saddam's Iraq is $415 million. But these pale in comparison with the $2.5 billion that French banks have lent Iran. The figures come from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, and were interpreted by Inigo More for a Madrid think-tank, the Real Instituto Elcano. As he says, "one could think that Parisian bankers wait for the U.S. to have an international problem before taking out their checkbooks." French banks seem to be almost anywhere U.S. banks are absent. They lend in 57 such countries, and are the main lenders in 23 of those. (His report can be read at realinstitutoelcano.org.) The report offers reasons why Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin really ought to stop using the phrase "our American friends" every time he talks about the U.S.
The Inigo More report at the Real Instituto ElCano is in Spanish so I am unable to read it, but perhaps those more fluent than I can take a look and illuminate the rest of us.
The Money's Bottom Line, as they say, is that if you want to know of any large, non-Muslim, insititutions that are making it easier for our enemies to kill people of all ilks around the world, you just have to take a look at our 'friends' -- the French and the Germans.
Posted by Vanderleun at November 25, 2003 08:39 AM
If Iraq were the Czech Republic... something of stretch, to put it mildly, but still... just as the great Vaclav Havel was the first president of a liberated Czechoslovakia (soon to be the Czech Republic), Kanan Makiya would be an excellent first president of a Free Iraq. His actions and his writings have been truly courageous.
Now the professor has set about memorializing the activities of the Baath Party with two and half million (!) party documents piled up in his old family house in Baghdad. Not surprisingly, according to a New York Times article this morning, these papers reveal that many of these tortures and assasinations were fueled by money... and plenty of it.
As Instapundit notes, this must be "making people nervous." Nervous, indeed! My question is--where did this money come from? Where did Saddam get the moolah to reward his henchmen for dragging his fellow Iraqis through the streets or dropping them in shredders? I'm not going to say right now it came straight from the UN Oil-for-Food program, but WHERE IS THAT MONEY? Why haven't Kofi Annan et al produced the files? Until they do, there is a taint on the UN of tragic proportions, as far as I am concerned. And where is the media in all this? The Times article this morning by Joel Brinkley was a good start, but there is a monumental story here waiting to be told. Were France, Germany and Russia all feeding this totalitarian homicide machine--those same people who attack us for trying to put a stop it? We have a right to know!
UPDATE: Gerard Van Der Leun has an answer.
The Terrorist Money Trail Passes Through Paris and Bonn
ROGER SIMON asks about the financing of Saddam's terror in: SHOW ME THE MONEY!
My question is--where did this money come from? Where did Saddam get the moolah to reward his henchmen for dragging his fellow Iraqis through the streets or dropping them in shredders? I'm not going to say right now it came straight from the UN Oil-for-Food program, but WHERE IS THAT MONEY?
Yes, where is that UN money? Perhaps it went back to the same FOUNTAIN OF FUNDING for the Masters of Terror the world over, the French and German banks.
Yesterday, in the Wall St Journal, Michael Gonzalez wrote: Vive Le Checkbook [It's available to subscribers only, so I'll just reprint a couple of indicative paragraphs.]
"Follow the money" is an old adage, and it means that economic interest will eventually explain much human behavior. That France opposed the removal of Saddam Hussein because he owed millions to French banks is proof of this. Less well known, but much more troubling, are key French financial links with other U.S. enemies. They raise the belief that the Franco-American conflict over Iraq was just one slice of the action. For France was not just Baathist Iraq's largest contributor of funds; French banks have financed other odious regimes. They are the No. 1 lenders to Iran and Cuba and past and present U.S. foes such as Somalia, Sudan and Vietnam.
This type of financing is shared by Germany, France's partner. German banks are North Korea's biggest lenders, and Syria's -- and Libya's. But France is the most active. In Castro's sizzling gulag, French banks plunked down $549 million in the first trimester this year, a third of all credit to Cuba. The figure for Saddam's Iraq is $415 million. But these pale in comparison with the $2.5 billion that French banks have lent Iran. The figures come from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, and were interpreted by Inigo More for a Madrid think-tank, the Real Instituto Elcano. As he says, "one could think that Parisian bankers wait for the U.S. to have an international problem before taking out their checkbooks." French banks seem to be almost anywhere U.S. banks are absent. They lend in 57 such countries, and are the main lenders in 23 of those. (His report can be read at realinstitutoelcano.org.) The report offers reasons why Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin really ought to stop using the phrase "our American friends" every time he talks about the U.S.
The Inigo More report at the Real Instituto ElCano is in Spanish so I am unable to read it, but perhaps those more fluent than I can take a look and illuminate the rest of us.
The Money's Bottom Line, as they say, is that if you want to know of any large, non-Muslim, insititutions that are making it easier for our enemies to kill people of all ilks around the world, you just have to take a look at our 'friends' -- the French and the Germans.
Posted by Vanderleun at November 25, 2003 08:39 AM
Monday, November 24, 2003
Missing Links Found
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
Published: November 24, 2003
WASHINGTON — Two blockbuster magazine articles last week revealed evidence that Saddam's spy agency and top Qaeda operatives certainly were in frequent contact for a decade, and that there is renewed reason to suspect an Iraqi spymaster in Prague may have helped finance the 9/11 attacks.
On weeklystandard.com, you can find chunks of a 16-page letter by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, responding to a Senate Intelligence Committee request for evidence of Saddam-bin Laden collaboration. Fifty specific instances from C.I.A., N.S.A., F.B.I. and Pentagon files are described, many from "sensitive reporting" never made public.
The Defense Department acknowledged the Oct. 27 letter included a classified annex of "raw reports or products" of U.S. intelligence agencies on "the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," cautioning that it "drew no conclusions." But with so much connective tissue exposed — some the result of "custodial interviews" of prisoners — the burden of proof has shifted to those still grimly in denial.
Remember how anti-liberation politicians and journalists pooh-poohed Colin Powell's February 2003 speech to the U.N. about the presence in Iraq of a Qaeda associate, identified in this space as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Powell's assertion had this "sensitive reporting" basis: "As of Oct. 2002 al Zarqawi was setting up sleeper cells in Baghdad to be activated in case of a U.S. occupation of the city."
Deniers derogate as "cherry picking" Feith's intelligence summary available to senators: "The Czech counterintelligence service reported that the Sept. 11 hijacker [Mohamed] Atta met with the former Iraqi intelligence chief in Prague, al Ani, on several occasions. During one of those meetings, al Ani ordered the IIS [Iraq Intelligence Service] finance officer to issue Atta funds from IIS financial holdings in the Prague office."
If true, that would implicate Saddam's regime in the murder of 3,000 Americans. Though the C.I.A. can confirm two Atta trips to Prague, in 1994 and 2000, it cannot confirm the two other visits the Czechs reported, including one on April 9, 2001, with Saddam's top European agent, al-Ani, then vice consul in Prague. C.I.A. chief George Tenet testified that the meeting reported by the Czech service was "possible," but the F.B.I. floated hints that car rental records showed Atta to be traveling between Virginia and Florida that week.
Enter the writer Edward Jay Epstein in the liberal online journal Slate: "All these reports attributed to the FBI were, as it turns out, erroneous. There were no car rental records in Virginia, Florida, or anywhere else in April 2001 for Mohamed Atta, since he had not yet obtained his Florida license." You cannot rent a car without a driver's license.
Epstein went to Prague this month to interview Czech officials who want to cooperate with the U.S. to get to the bottom of the Atta-Iraqi story but have been stiffed by the F.B.I., whose bureaucracy is sensitive to charges of failed surveillance. Read his detailed Slate report and subsequent commentary on edwardjayepstein.com.
Since July, al-Ani has been in U.S. Department of Justice custody and I wonder how effectively he is being interrogated. Have we learned the whereabouts of his Prague and Baghdad aides and secretaries, and taken their testimony? Have we asked M.I.5 to let us speak to Jabir Salim, his Prague station-chief predecessor, who defected to Britain and may know which employees and which banks could transfer $100,000 to an account accessible to Atta?
Did al-Ani order any payment to "the student from Hamburg" or his co-conspirators, as Czech intelligence believes, and did the paymaster carry out the order? To what superior in Baghdad did al-Ani report, and who worked most closely with him, and are they in custody and do their stories jibe? What have we offered al-Ani, in protection or immunity or plea bargain, to turn state's evidence?
F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller is duty-bound to examine the full transcript of the interrogation to see how seriously this is being pursued; same with Senate Intelligence. I'd also assign new agents to follow up leads in Prague.
Intrepid journalists will ultimately bring the full story of the Saddam-bin Laden connection to light. In the meantime, the F.B.I. should stop treating 9/11 as a cold case.
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
Published: November 24, 2003
WASHINGTON — Two blockbuster magazine articles last week revealed evidence that Saddam's spy agency and top Qaeda operatives certainly were in frequent contact for a decade, and that there is renewed reason to suspect an Iraqi spymaster in Prague may have helped finance the 9/11 attacks.
On weeklystandard.com, you can find chunks of a 16-page letter by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, responding to a Senate Intelligence Committee request for evidence of Saddam-bin Laden collaboration. Fifty specific instances from C.I.A., N.S.A., F.B.I. and Pentagon files are described, many from "sensitive reporting" never made public.
The Defense Department acknowledged the Oct. 27 letter included a classified annex of "raw reports or products" of U.S. intelligence agencies on "the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," cautioning that it "drew no conclusions." But with so much connective tissue exposed — some the result of "custodial interviews" of prisoners — the burden of proof has shifted to those still grimly in denial.
Remember how anti-liberation politicians and journalists pooh-poohed Colin Powell's February 2003 speech to the U.N. about the presence in Iraq of a Qaeda associate, identified in this space as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Powell's assertion had this "sensitive reporting" basis: "As of Oct. 2002 al Zarqawi was setting up sleeper cells in Baghdad to be activated in case of a U.S. occupation of the city."
Deniers derogate as "cherry picking" Feith's intelligence summary available to senators: "The Czech counterintelligence service reported that the Sept. 11 hijacker [Mohamed] Atta met with the former Iraqi intelligence chief in Prague, al Ani, on several occasions. During one of those meetings, al Ani ordered the IIS [Iraq Intelligence Service] finance officer to issue Atta funds from IIS financial holdings in the Prague office."
If true, that would implicate Saddam's regime in the murder of 3,000 Americans. Though the C.I.A. can confirm two Atta trips to Prague, in 1994 and 2000, it cannot confirm the two other visits the Czechs reported, including one on April 9, 2001, with Saddam's top European agent, al-Ani, then vice consul in Prague. C.I.A. chief George Tenet testified that the meeting reported by the Czech service was "possible," but the F.B.I. floated hints that car rental records showed Atta to be traveling between Virginia and Florida that week.
Enter the writer Edward Jay Epstein in the liberal online journal Slate: "All these reports attributed to the FBI were, as it turns out, erroneous. There were no car rental records in Virginia, Florida, or anywhere else in April 2001 for Mohamed Atta, since he had not yet obtained his Florida license." You cannot rent a car without a driver's license.
Epstein went to Prague this month to interview Czech officials who want to cooperate with the U.S. to get to the bottom of the Atta-Iraqi story but have been stiffed by the F.B.I., whose bureaucracy is sensitive to charges of failed surveillance. Read his detailed Slate report and subsequent commentary on edwardjayepstein.com.
Since July, al-Ani has been in U.S. Department of Justice custody and I wonder how effectively he is being interrogated. Have we learned the whereabouts of his Prague and Baghdad aides and secretaries, and taken their testimony? Have we asked M.I.5 to let us speak to Jabir Salim, his Prague station-chief predecessor, who defected to Britain and may know which employees and which banks could transfer $100,000 to an account accessible to Atta?
Did al-Ani order any payment to "the student from Hamburg" or his co-conspirators, as Czech intelligence believes, and did the paymaster carry out the order? To what superior in Baghdad did al-Ani report, and who worked most closely with him, and are they in custody and do their stories jibe? What have we offered al-Ani, in protection or immunity or plea bargain, to turn state's evidence?
F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller is duty-bound to examine the full transcript of the interrogation to see how seriously this is being pursued; same with Senate Intelligence. I'd also assign new agents to follow up leads in Prague.
Intrepid journalists will ultimately bring the full story of the Saddam-bin Laden connection to light. In the meantime, the F.B.I. should stop treating 9/11 as a cold case.
Blind faith in Bruce almighty
The unparalleled devotion of Springsteen fans has even spawned a mini-publishing industry. Now one British Muslim whose life was transformed by the Boss is ready for a future without him
Sarfraz Manzoor
Sunday November 23, 2003
The Observer
You never forget your first time. It was 25 June 1988, Wembley Stadium: my first Bruce Springsteen concert. I was just another 17-year-old student living in a dismal town. At college I was an enthusiastic and sociable student, but once the last class of the day was over my life took an inexorable turn towards dullness. It wasn't just that this was the Eighties, before the virtual freedoms of the internet and mobile phones; it wasn't just that I lived in Luton, a place so mediocre we considered Milton Keynes the peak of urban sophistication; it was that my parents were traditional working class Muslims. That made them overprotective; to their eyes the outside world was a teeming throng of temptations. Consequently, while my friends spent their evenings sinking pints and being dumped by girls, I was at home in front of the television.
I had discovered Springsteen by accident at the start of term and, since then, like an alter ego in a superhero comic book, I had been living a secret life, supplementing my standard college education with an intense parallel course in advanced Springsteen studies. The core syllabus consisted of his official released albums, the reading list was a selection of biographies and articles, and the homework involved listening to every album on a daily basis.
Such dedication was solitary work; thankfully I did not have a social life to distract me from close textual analysis of song lyrics, poring over liner notes and ordering bootleg live concerts from anonymous post office boxes. The music gave me everything my life did not and, armed with its secondhand wisdom, I began to believe in another future for myself. I may have lived in a town full of losers but so had Bruce, and like him I was going to pull out of there and win.
This was about so much more than just music, but my family remained unaware of my secret dreams; they may have noted the way I would rush upstairs to my room as soon as I returned from college or how I chose to eat in my bedroom rather than with them. They certainly saw the colossal posters that were plastered over my walls, but to my parents this was all a rather unwelcome phase that I was going through. Perhaps if they let me see this American rock star in concert, they reasoned, I would have my fill of this Bruce character and things could go back to how they were.
Fifteen years elapse. Friends appear and vanish; my hair lengthens and twists briefly into dreadlocks; my career in the media develops as I work for television and newspapers. Threaded throughout the sequence are other moments: at 17 at Wembley Stadium, at 21 at Wembley Arena, at 24 at the Albert Hall, at 27 at Earls Court - and dozens more, ending with Shea Stadium in New York last month. My life has changed hugely but the one constant has been Springsteen; he has been the soundtrack to my adult life.
The past decade has been generously studded with Springsteen gigs but my concert attendance has recently increased in frequency and urgency. Last year I flew to the United States for the first three shows of Springsteen's world tour; I saw him in Britain, France, Spain and Italy last autumn and in Britain and Sweden this summer for the stadium tour. I was in New Jersey last month for the final three shows of a record-smashing 10-night residency at Giants Stadium, and I was there for the final nights of the tour when it concluded in New York last month. By then I had attended 18 concerts on this tour alone.
Insanity perhaps, but I am not alone. More than three million people have caught the tour over the past 14 months and 120 concerts, making it among the most lucrative in history. That success is due to the loyalty of fans whose devotion verges on the religious. There have been four books and two documentary films devoted exclusively to Springsteen fans, ranging from anthologies of adulation written by fans (Carole Tuszynski's Bruce Springsteen - Our Reasons to Believe) and academic analysis of fandom (Daniel Cavicchi's Tramps Like Us - Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans) through to high-minded cultural critiques in the forthcoming book by Robert Coles, Bruce Springsteen's America: The People Listening, a Poet Singing. What these books demonstrate is that to his fans Springsteen is not just a singer, and the appeal of his music is not just the songs.
'Following' a particular singer is usually a figure of speech but with Springsteen's fans it is often a literal description of how they spend their time. As I followed the tour around Europe I met fans who attended 30 or 40 concerts; many had spent the spring working to save money and the summer travelling from city to city seeing the shows.
After the first few concerts, the hardcore - those at the front every night - became familiar to Springsteen, and he would make a point of acknowledging them. In the United States the average age of fans was older but there was still a travelling band of men and women who would think nothing of flying across the country or driving through the night to make it to the concert.
For anyone who has not seen him in concert it must he hard to understand such behaviour. Right from the start of his career it was the live shows that made Springsteen's reputation; it was on stage that his music truly came alive. After one such concert in 1974 music critic Jon Landau claimed in a review that he had seen 'rock and roll's future' and that Springsteen seeks to 'liberate our spirit while he liberates his by baring his soul through his music'. Landau is now Springsteen's manager.
Fans have been described as worshippers at an invisible church and the concerts are where that imagined community is nightly rendered real. Given his awesome live reputation, it is surprising that until now there has never been an official concert video. That injustice was corrected last week with the release of Bruce Springsteen - Live in Barcelona. Look carefully and you might spot my blue-striped woolly hat bobbing in the crowd by the stage.
The audience at that concert, like other European crowds, was younger than in the United States. For these fans, many barely in their twenties, this was compensation for missing out on earlier tours. Springsteen turned 54 in September and many thought this could be the last full-scale tour with his fabled E Street Band. In both the US and Europe fans span the political spectrum; at the New Jersey concerts they ranged from a young woman whose T-shirt claimed 'My bush could run America better' to the meatheads who sang along to 'Born in the USA' still thinking it was a patriotic anthem.
Springsteen is rarely explicitly political but anyone who reads his lyrics can see that he is no friend of free market economics; many of his best songs are about the impact that unemployment has on the dignity of decent men. Lately he has spoken out in support of the Dixie Chicks, who were attacked for criticising George Bush, and has warned of the dangers of an erosion in civil rights after 11 September. He made a nightly speech during this year's concerts arguing for questions to be asked about how the Bush administration prosecuted the war in Iraq.
For the Gothenburg show that I attended, the fans were at the turnstiles a week before the doors opened; they slept on cardboard and wrapped themselves with bin liners to keep out the cold. Those same scenes were played out throughout Europe, and at the front of the stage every night would be Italians and Spaniards, Swedes and Finns, all singing along to this most iconic of American songwriters.
This was at a time of widespread hostility to the US stance on Iraq. The fans who congregated in their thousands to see Springsteen in stadiums in Paris, Germany and Madrid could be the same young men who marched in protest against Bush's actions. The devotion of his fans has had an influence on Springsteen. A chance meeting with young fans five years ago persuaded him to reunite with the E Street Band after having broken up the group in the late Eighties. And after 11 September it was a fan who persuaded Springsteen that he had a role to play on his last album, The Rising, in reflecting and articulating the pain that was engulfing the nation.
When I was a teenage fan, growing up in Luton but dreaming American dreams, Bruce Springsteen's music held out a promise and a hope. It was the promise of freedom and the hope of escape. As a young man I went to see Springsteen and came away invigorated with ambitions and dreams, not all of which have come true in the intervening years. But 15 years later, a Springsteen concert can no longer be an occasion of uncomplicated pleasure.
His music has meant so much to me that these days it is often a bittersweet experience. Springsteen's songs helped me fashion a new identity based on who I wanted to be rather than what I was. I managed to leave Luton and carve out a life that would have seemed a glorious dream to the teenage me, but it was an identity which sought to disregard what I was: a Pakistani Muslim's son.
In the week before I flew to the United States to see the final show of the tour, my mother asked to speak to me. We sat down and she explained that she was worried that I was still single; would I let her approach interested parties with a view to perhaps arranging something. I flinched. Most of my Asian friends are now married and I think that part of the reason why I am not is because my expectations of love and marriage have been shaped by the culture I devoured when young and the music of Springsteen.
When I was 16, listening to Springsteen's romantic songs, I knew that this was what I wanted from life; it didn't seem likely to be found in a marriage of strangers. So I did not succumb when those around me did, and kept believing that there would come a time when I would be able to live those lines rather than just sing them. But time passed and the excuses slipped away. Going to concerts became a way of renewing faith, of reminding myself that Springsteen's music implied a sacred promise between him, me and the music.
That, I think, is the real reason for the desperate frequency of my concert attendance: it is not the end of the road for Bruce Springsteen but it might be for me. That was why the last few concerts were such a bittersweet experience. Everyone around me was being transported, fists were thrust into the sky and there was a glorious joyousness in the passion of the fans. I tried to join in but I could not; the words meant too much to me now - each song that spoke of love felt like a reminder and an accusation that I had let myself down.
The lesson of Springsteen was not to follow him but to follow your dreams. When he walked off the stage at Shea Stadium that final night I suddenly felt very alone; the cold night bit deep into my ribs and I wondered what the future held. As long as the tour was travelling, the big questions could be confined and delayed; when it ended, it felt like the end of a part of my life, the end of a dream that life could mirror a Bruce Springsteen love song. Maybe it is fitting that just when I need him most, Bruce is leaving the stage.
· The Essential Bruce Springsteen is out now on CD.
· Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band - Live in Barcelona is out on DVD.
· Bruce Springsteen: Songs is out in paperback now.
· Days of Hope and Dreams: An Intimate Portrait of Bruce Springsteen is by Frank Stefanko.
· Bruce Springsteen's America: The People Listening, a Poet Singing is by Robert Coles.
· Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts by Dave Marsh is published by Routledge next week.
· Sarfraz Manzoor is a commissioning editor at Channel 4
The unparalleled devotion of Springsteen fans has even spawned a mini-publishing industry. Now one British Muslim whose life was transformed by the Boss is ready for a future without him
Sarfraz Manzoor
Sunday November 23, 2003
The Observer
You never forget your first time. It was 25 June 1988, Wembley Stadium: my first Bruce Springsteen concert. I was just another 17-year-old student living in a dismal town. At college I was an enthusiastic and sociable student, but once the last class of the day was over my life took an inexorable turn towards dullness. It wasn't just that this was the Eighties, before the virtual freedoms of the internet and mobile phones; it wasn't just that I lived in Luton, a place so mediocre we considered Milton Keynes the peak of urban sophistication; it was that my parents were traditional working class Muslims. That made them overprotective; to their eyes the outside world was a teeming throng of temptations. Consequently, while my friends spent their evenings sinking pints and being dumped by girls, I was at home in front of the television.
I had discovered Springsteen by accident at the start of term and, since then, like an alter ego in a superhero comic book, I had been living a secret life, supplementing my standard college education with an intense parallel course in advanced Springsteen studies. The core syllabus consisted of his official released albums, the reading list was a selection of biographies and articles, and the homework involved listening to every album on a daily basis.
Such dedication was solitary work; thankfully I did not have a social life to distract me from close textual analysis of song lyrics, poring over liner notes and ordering bootleg live concerts from anonymous post office boxes. The music gave me everything my life did not and, armed with its secondhand wisdom, I began to believe in another future for myself. I may have lived in a town full of losers but so had Bruce, and like him I was going to pull out of there and win.
This was about so much more than just music, but my family remained unaware of my secret dreams; they may have noted the way I would rush upstairs to my room as soon as I returned from college or how I chose to eat in my bedroom rather than with them. They certainly saw the colossal posters that were plastered over my walls, but to my parents this was all a rather unwelcome phase that I was going through. Perhaps if they let me see this American rock star in concert, they reasoned, I would have my fill of this Bruce character and things could go back to how they were.
Fifteen years elapse. Friends appear and vanish; my hair lengthens and twists briefly into dreadlocks; my career in the media develops as I work for television and newspapers. Threaded throughout the sequence are other moments: at 17 at Wembley Stadium, at 21 at Wembley Arena, at 24 at the Albert Hall, at 27 at Earls Court - and dozens more, ending with Shea Stadium in New York last month. My life has changed hugely but the one constant has been Springsteen; he has been the soundtrack to my adult life.
The past decade has been generously studded with Springsteen gigs but my concert attendance has recently increased in frequency and urgency. Last year I flew to the United States for the first three shows of Springsteen's world tour; I saw him in Britain, France, Spain and Italy last autumn and in Britain and Sweden this summer for the stadium tour. I was in New Jersey last month for the final three shows of a record-smashing 10-night residency at Giants Stadium, and I was there for the final nights of the tour when it concluded in New York last month. By then I had attended 18 concerts on this tour alone.
Insanity perhaps, but I am not alone. More than three million people have caught the tour over the past 14 months and 120 concerts, making it among the most lucrative in history. That success is due to the loyalty of fans whose devotion verges on the religious. There have been four books and two documentary films devoted exclusively to Springsteen fans, ranging from anthologies of adulation written by fans (Carole Tuszynski's Bruce Springsteen - Our Reasons to Believe) and academic analysis of fandom (Daniel Cavicchi's Tramps Like Us - Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans) through to high-minded cultural critiques in the forthcoming book by Robert Coles, Bruce Springsteen's America: The People Listening, a Poet Singing. What these books demonstrate is that to his fans Springsteen is not just a singer, and the appeal of his music is not just the songs.
'Following' a particular singer is usually a figure of speech but with Springsteen's fans it is often a literal description of how they spend their time. As I followed the tour around Europe I met fans who attended 30 or 40 concerts; many had spent the spring working to save money and the summer travelling from city to city seeing the shows.
After the first few concerts, the hardcore - those at the front every night - became familiar to Springsteen, and he would make a point of acknowledging them. In the United States the average age of fans was older but there was still a travelling band of men and women who would think nothing of flying across the country or driving through the night to make it to the concert.
For anyone who has not seen him in concert it must he hard to understand such behaviour. Right from the start of his career it was the live shows that made Springsteen's reputation; it was on stage that his music truly came alive. After one such concert in 1974 music critic Jon Landau claimed in a review that he had seen 'rock and roll's future' and that Springsteen seeks to 'liberate our spirit while he liberates his by baring his soul through his music'. Landau is now Springsteen's manager.
Fans have been described as worshippers at an invisible church and the concerts are where that imagined community is nightly rendered real. Given his awesome live reputation, it is surprising that until now there has never been an official concert video. That injustice was corrected last week with the release of Bruce Springsteen - Live in Barcelona. Look carefully and you might spot my blue-striped woolly hat bobbing in the crowd by the stage.
The audience at that concert, like other European crowds, was younger than in the United States. For these fans, many barely in their twenties, this was compensation for missing out on earlier tours. Springsteen turned 54 in September and many thought this could be the last full-scale tour with his fabled E Street Band. In both the US and Europe fans span the political spectrum; at the New Jersey concerts they ranged from a young woman whose T-shirt claimed 'My bush could run America better' to the meatheads who sang along to 'Born in the USA' still thinking it was a patriotic anthem.
Springsteen is rarely explicitly political but anyone who reads his lyrics can see that he is no friend of free market economics; many of his best songs are about the impact that unemployment has on the dignity of decent men. Lately he has spoken out in support of the Dixie Chicks, who were attacked for criticising George Bush, and has warned of the dangers of an erosion in civil rights after 11 September. He made a nightly speech during this year's concerts arguing for questions to be asked about how the Bush administration prosecuted the war in Iraq.
For the Gothenburg show that I attended, the fans were at the turnstiles a week before the doors opened; they slept on cardboard and wrapped themselves with bin liners to keep out the cold. Those same scenes were played out throughout Europe, and at the front of the stage every night would be Italians and Spaniards, Swedes and Finns, all singing along to this most iconic of American songwriters.
This was at a time of widespread hostility to the US stance on Iraq. The fans who congregated in their thousands to see Springsteen in stadiums in Paris, Germany and Madrid could be the same young men who marched in protest against Bush's actions. The devotion of his fans has had an influence on Springsteen. A chance meeting with young fans five years ago persuaded him to reunite with the E Street Band after having broken up the group in the late Eighties. And after 11 September it was a fan who persuaded Springsteen that he had a role to play on his last album, The Rising, in reflecting and articulating the pain that was engulfing the nation.
When I was a teenage fan, growing up in Luton but dreaming American dreams, Bruce Springsteen's music held out a promise and a hope. It was the promise of freedom and the hope of escape. As a young man I went to see Springsteen and came away invigorated with ambitions and dreams, not all of which have come true in the intervening years. But 15 years later, a Springsteen concert can no longer be an occasion of uncomplicated pleasure.
His music has meant so much to me that these days it is often a bittersweet experience. Springsteen's songs helped me fashion a new identity based on who I wanted to be rather than what I was. I managed to leave Luton and carve out a life that would have seemed a glorious dream to the teenage me, but it was an identity which sought to disregard what I was: a Pakistani Muslim's son.
In the week before I flew to the United States to see the final show of the tour, my mother asked to speak to me. We sat down and she explained that she was worried that I was still single; would I let her approach interested parties with a view to perhaps arranging something. I flinched. Most of my Asian friends are now married and I think that part of the reason why I am not is because my expectations of love and marriage have been shaped by the culture I devoured when young and the music of Springsteen.
When I was 16, listening to Springsteen's romantic songs, I knew that this was what I wanted from life; it didn't seem likely to be found in a marriage of strangers. So I did not succumb when those around me did, and kept believing that there would come a time when I would be able to live those lines rather than just sing them. But time passed and the excuses slipped away. Going to concerts became a way of renewing faith, of reminding myself that Springsteen's music implied a sacred promise between him, me and the music.
That, I think, is the real reason for the desperate frequency of my concert attendance: it is not the end of the road for Bruce Springsteen but it might be for me. That was why the last few concerts were such a bittersweet experience. Everyone around me was being transported, fists were thrust into the sky and there was a glorious joyousness in the passion of the fans. I tried to join in but I could not; the words meant too much to me now - each song that spoke of love felt like a reminder and an accusation that I had let myself down.
The lesson of Springsteen was not to follow him but to follow your dreams. When he walked off the stage at Shea Stadium that final night I suddenly felt very alone; the cold night bit deep into my ribs and I wondered what the future held. As long as the tour was travelling, the big questions could be confined and delayed; when it ended, it felt like the end of a part of my life, the end of a dream that life could mirror a Bruce Springsteen love song. Maybe it is fitting that just when I need him most, Bruce is leaving the stage.
· The Essential Bruce Springsteen is out now on CD.
· Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band - Live in Barcelona is out on DVD.
· Bruce Springsteen: Songs is out in paperback now.
· Days of Hope and Dreams: An Intimate Portrait of Bruce Springsteen is by Frank Stefanko.
· Bruce Springsteen's America: The People Listening, a Poet Singing is by Robert Coles.
· Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts by Dave Marsh is published by Routledge next week.
· Sarfraz Manzoor is a commissioning editor at Channel 4
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