the levantine crotch.

I had a bad day today; so much so that I spent a good two hours at work writing a long post about things that I hate. Really, a list of things I hate. Instead of that crap, you should read Leon Wieseltier's review of Martin Amis's newest book, The Second Plane. Maybe I've been reading too many book reviews lately, or too much about theories of history, but I found it sharp and, frankly, amusing:

"The masculinist account of terrorism brings to mind the feminist account of nuclear weapons, according to which all you need to know about the origin of the danger is the shape of the missile. The genital theory of history may be novelistically useful, but it is analytically silly. In this case, it reduces decades and centuries of philosophies and cultures and religions and tribes and classes and nations and movements and states and empires to the Levantine crotch. Surely we must be able to imagine, not only for the sake of our literature but also for the sake of our security, that there are sexually satisfied enemies of decency and modernity. And enough about those patient virgins in the sky: the threat from suicide bombing, and from the political cultures that prize it, is founded on deformations more worldly and more substantial than a harem fantasy."