If you read the comments, you might notice my own rather flaccid attempt to defuse some of the madness.  Pointless.

The first is straightforward.  Life is short, I’m getting older, and I’ve only published a handful of times.  The second, however, has behind it the weight of all my neuroses, the dismal fate of everything I care about, and the reading public’s irrepressible pugnacity.

My daily news consumption is comprised of bouncing back and forth between (rather incestuously interlinked) opinion sites, navigating through an infinite snarl of articles about how to make sense of what’s happening in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan and Israel and the Arab world.  Some, many, of the articles are thoughtful and compelling and motivated by the sincere desire to add nuance to the arguments on both sides.

I used to have the good sense to stop there, to just read a bunch of articles and then let them smolder awhile as I considered whether my own thinking had changed at all.  (Often it does, a smidge.)  Recently though, maybe because my days are spent with a very agreeable infant, I started reading the comments.  Now I can’t stop.  It’s hard to find any online news outlets anymore than don’t encourage reader comments on some or all of their content, and oh, the despair I feel as I read what people will write when protected by anonymity.  I read and read and read these things people say, cruelties they would never dream of inflicting on the writer in person, and I think, how did this happen?

It’s hard not to watch in amazement as political, sexual, racial, national, religious, and class tensions erupt into profane pissing contests.  The self-righteousness!  The indignation!  The endless disputes over semantics!  And none of this even comes close to the worst of commenters’ tendencies, the ad hominem attacks.  No writer is safe.  Whether you write bad reviews of popular movies or good reviews of unpopular ones, whether you criticize President Obama’s gutlessness or lament the obstacles he faces, whether you write, from personal experience, about growing up Muslim or bring some geopolitical expertise to bear on the subject of drones, commenting readers will call you “hack” or “apologist” or “Uncle Tom” and utterly befoul your sincerity, your experience, and the incredibly hard work you did to make that byline a reality.  I’m not advocating for treating journalists and critics as though they dispense Platonic truths, but it seems to have become perfectly acceptable to respond to their work with open contempt.  One of the democratizing effects of the internet is the commenting mob’s conviction that its own hastily uploaded opinions are just as well-thought-out and researched and articulated as the ones they log on, day after day, to read.  The result is that writers must be willing to make themselves vulnerable in an unprecedented way.  (I know calling it “the mob” isn’t going to win me any friends, but things are really getting out of hand.)

Of course, not all comments devolve to such an extent, but plenty do, and I see it every day.  And a part of me, the milquetoast part perhaps, is truly, utterly terrified of the prospect of writing something that really infuriates someone.  Unfortunately, that’s the only sort of piece I want to write.  It’s not a thicker skin I need; it’s a flak jacket.

Even if Mubarak does indeed have supporters, Egyptians who claim that the country needs him, that “stability” is paramount, does this in any way delegitimize the efforts or the urgent need to oust him?  Apparently, even tyrants have their devotees: those few at the top who have benefitted from the double-dealing; ideologues whose view of history is shaped entirely by the corrupt regime’s invented narrative; fascists, sociopaths and churlish contrarians.

There were cheering Haitians cheering Baby Doc’s return last month.  Not very many, but enough to form a small, adoring crowd he could wave at benevolently from his hotel balcony.  Enough to make you scratch your head, think about the history you know, and wonder what the hell is wrong with people.

Even Zia-ul-Haq, who almost single-handedly destroyed any hopes Pakistan once had of becoming a functioning, flourishing state (with a little help from his predecessor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto), continues to inspire paeans from weepy legatees, the very same miscreants who, 23 years after they buried some of his teeth (so he could continue to menace the underworld with his grin), now march in huge numbers in support of the blasphemy laws he installed.

Does this necessarily mean there are two equally valid sides, that there is always another perspective worth exploring, in every story?  Most of the journalism that’s recording these events, comprising the foundations of what will one day become the accepted history of the times we live in, is trying very hard to give weight to alternate versions of what’s happening in Egypt.  I’m no lover of the New York Times, and in particular find their coverage of the Middle East and South Asia conventionally, predictably defective; but when they print a demonstrably untrue and oddly slanderous piece about al-Jazeera (the only network that grasped the importance of the popular revolt against Tunisia’s Ben Ali, the only network whose reports on the last week in Egypt I’ll watch), all the while continuing their own mediocre and misleading coverage of those events, I begin to question whether any revolution can succeed when there are so many forces, even supposedly democratic ones, working against it.

When I first became pregnant, I resolved never to write about it, neither to turn my blog into a record of my every surreal symptom, nor to plumb my experiences for topics to pitch for publication, despite how mommy-bloggers have carved out a glacial online niche for themselves, and despite the profusion of smug stories in so many popular rags about one mother’s choice to circumcise/deliver by elective c-section/travel to a smelly third world country with her infant.  Perhaps if I had given in to the urge to write about being pregnant, I’d have come up with more than one publishable piece in the last four months.

Instead, true to my nature, I’ve read, continuously and obsessively, about other women’s pregnancy and childbirth experiences.  After exhausting the mainstream, as well as less conventional, medical information available on the subject, I turned to trolling the message boards populated by women with whom I share a February due date.  Here, I confess, my tastes tend toward the purely voyeuristic; having learned early that the more serious posts tend to keep me up at night conjuring disasters, I’m drawn to the less forbidding ones with “TMI” in the subject line (usually signifying something to do with vaginas, though occasionally more demure posters use it to warn us about a nipple-related question), or threads by teen mothers who write tirades against their moms and freaked out boyfriends with the same linguistic finesse they no doubt employ when texting their bff’s.

It’s been eye-opening to discover just how many teen mothers there are on these websites.  In fact, if I’m to believe an informal poll conducted by one curious poster, at 34, I’m officially the oldest respondent in the group of hundreds.  How can this be, I wonder, in an age when so much ire is directed in comments sections at the increasing numbers of American women who decide in their forties to conceive their first child?  (And where are the message boards they use?)  What’s more, the only women who even approximate my hoary, wizened self are on their third, fourth, and fifth children.  One woman, at thirty-one, is about to deliver her ninth.  She recently “vented” about an encounter in a big-box store with a lady who, ogling the young woman’s large brood, asked her if she knew how contraception works, to which our gravid friend responded with a well-timed and highly effective sneer that sent the interloper scurrying.  The ladies on the message board You Go Girl’d and Woo Hoo’d the poster for several pages, feverish with conviction.  At this point, it’s clear I’m here not for the information or some vague semblance of “support” but because I can’t get enough of just how self-congratulatory groups of pregnant women can be.

Exchanges among the ladies on the message board have also become strained and noticeably more combative in recent weeks.  This makes perfect sense, though, as our collective due dates draw near.  More and more posts are fitful diatribes about how the mothers feel “so done with this pregnancy,” and how “I’m never doing this again!”  This, I understand.  The last month is a trial, to say the least, as our bodies seem no longer able to perform the simplest tasks.  It’s hard to concentrate on anything not infant-related (this post has actually taken me over two weeks to complete), and the constant planning and re-planning begins to look a lot like unhealthy obsession.  And what a cute word “nesting” is for this urgent compulsion I have every couple of days to re-fold two dozen onesies, re-organize them according to color (or size, or adorableness, or degree of hand-me-down disrepair), and put them back in the drawer.  I should mention that this is especially odd behavior for someone who, when not pregnant, does housework with the sort of grudging reluctance usually seen in Italian grandfathers.

Maybe it would help to commit myself to five more blog posts in the next month, none of them baby-related.  I’m not optimistic, but I’ll try.

Trablous (Tripoli)

Beirutis like to say that Tripoli is “more like Syria than Lebanon,” and it’s not a compliment.   It’s relatively conservative, there’s virtually no night-life, and missing is the army of South Asian street cleaners, ubiquitous in Beirut, to pick up after the locals who litter with impunity.  The lack of investment in tourism is openly blamed on the fact that Tripoli is largely Muslim, though I’m not sure I buy this, given how much of the Islamic middle east is unabashedly geared toward deep-pocketed visitors.  It seems that Tripoli, despite the presence of remarkable antiquities and a stunning turquoise Mediterranean coastline, doesn’t see itself as anything other than a busy town trying to survive in the midst of Lebanon’s deep and ongoing financial and political distress.

Coffee-seller in old city

So, after a slow walk through the souks and a good lunch by the sea, it was hard to begrudge Tripoli the uncomfortable evening we’d just spent.

The destruction of Beirut’s souks is one of the lesser calamities the city has suffered as a result of repeated attacks, but it’s tragic nonetheless.  In an ironic turn of events, at the site of the old souks, where all the city’s inhabitants could expect to find the usual array from household essentials to precious metals, now stands the glittering monument to capitalism’s complete lack of memory, called Beirut Souks.  Here, people of substantial means can trip the well-lit and pristine cobble-stones from Balenciaga to Yves Saint Laurent, or carry on their search for $2000 Italian leather shoes.  (My favorite store name, incidentally, is Milord.  It just warms the blood of us former British subjects.)

Leaving aside my dismay that Beirut appears to be increasingly inhospitable to its middle class (let alone working class) inhabitants, there’s a reason the Lebanese are famed as preternaturally resilient, and Beirut Souks are a sort of middle-finger manifestation of this.  And there’s plenty of debate over the downtown’s new “soullessness” from both sides of the divide.  But visiting the souks in Tripoli was a powerful reminder of what’s irrevocably gone now from Beirut, and it’s more than just discounted clothing.

Early morning in Souk el Sayagheen

Before the shops open

The dense maze of narrow alleys that comprises Tripoli’s souks is spotlessly clean (the commercial parts, at least) and surprisingly navigable.  We entered at 9 am through a wet-market–where even the fish stalls didn’t really stink–occupied, as expected, by broad-shouldered shoppers walking fast and purposefully.  Further in, the crowd thinned as it was still early in the day, and utilitarian store-fronts gave way to lovely stone-and-wood facades and worn-down floors.  Souk el Sayagheen, the gold and silver market, was particularly serene and beautiful.  Only a few of the stalls were open yet, their owners yawning in the doorways and waiting for their tiny cups of coffee to be delivered.

In Khan Saboun, the soap factory

Branching off from the main alleys are even narrower ones, and if you don’t watch where you’re going, it’s easy to find yourself standing in someone’s foyer.  Front doors seem to be left indiscriminately open, revealing very modest interiors.

Sorry for intruding

A few more feet, and you’re back among the window displays of abayas and brassieres.  Conspicuously missing from all this are the touts that (to my mind) are a scourge on markets the world over, which made walking through the souks the two quietest hours we’ve spent in Lebanon.

There are definitely two Tripolis, just as there are two (or more) Beiruts.  Of course, every city has its multiple faces, where “first” and “third” worlds can be found within mere yards of one another.  But in cities like Lahore, Delhi, Cairo, and Tripoli, for example, there are clear borders between old and new, cities where people have been living continuously since before most of the world’s metropolises existed.  I love that I live in a country where such places can be found at every turn.

What most of Tripoli looks like

During the Eid holidays, R and I decided to rent a car and drive up to Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest city (though a distant second to Beirut in terms of population and area).  The lady at the car rental was aghast at the notion of driving so far, an inconceivable 85 km.  Clearly, distance is relative, and since Lebanon is half the size of the state of New Jersey, driving two hours along the coast is one of the more grueling journeys to be made in this country.  For R and me, who have spent untold hours together traveling by car, the most memorable being the 21 hours of straight driving from Islamabad to Hunza on the magnificent and terrifying Karakoram Highway, this little jaunt was officially the shortest road-trip we have ever made.

Jounieh and environs, en route to the north, is a jarring mix of commercial sprawl and none-too-subtle reminders that the area is Christian-dominated.  The giant Christ figure (one of many such statues) and the oddly solitary cathedrals perched high in the horizon are flanked in every direction by shopping complexes, casinos and strip clubs.  Once we passed through the perpetual traffic jam exiting Beirut, it was a fast and easy drive through the low, white hills, punctuated by the most repetitive and insistent outdoor marketing I’d ever seen.  There are these jeans, apparently, that perform such miracles on your arse that 250 massive view-blocking billboards are warranted to spread the word.

A little sitting area in the other hotel we looked at

According to the guidebooks, there are few hotels in Tripoli and even fewer restaurants.  To our disappointment, this turned out to be true.  (Perhaps if the city was more hospitable to visitors, more Beirutis would be willing to make the strenuous two hour drive.)  What little accommodation can be found falls somewhere between dingy and squalid.  We had to opt for squalid because the other choice lacked an en suite bathroom, and ladies in “my condition” tend to make frequent bathroom trips during the night, a decision that still makes me shudder.

The place we were compelled to choose, housed in a rather beautiful old building with stained glass windows and stunning wrought iron chandeliers in the lobby, is minded–though, apparently, not cared for–by a family of alcoholics who spend the day staring at separate TVs in the same big hall, slumped in chairs covered, like their occupants, with a sediment of fine white grit. The old gentleman, who seemed mostly put out by our desire to rent a room, perked up a bit when I tried speaking to him in French.  He told us that he and his family live on the 21st floor of a high-rise in the next town over, and because the elevators in their building are rendered useless for several hours a day by the nation-wide electrical outages, they are forced to live in this old hotel.  Perhaps they keep the place hovering at a critical mass of filth to wreak their considerable vengeance.

Deceptively pretty windows in the lobby.

View from the room

Truly, it would be hard to exaggerate the heinousness of our room.  Was it the beds, which were not actually beds at all, but rather large divans, possibly as old as the 160 year old building itself, mattress-less and bowed in the middle, and set ten feet apart from one another, creating an unfathomable dusty gulf between R and me?  Or was it the grime in the corners, its age measurable, surely, in geological time?  Was it the bathroom on the basis of which we shelled out $40 to lie awake all night, wide-eyed, waiting to be swallowed by the timeless, forlorn destitution of the space?  The sort of bathroom that is so forbidding that you enter with your trousers rolled up, your elbows tucked, and your very being braced for the kind of trauma that can only result from accidentally rubbing up against something unimaginably unsanitary?  Or was it the fact that the room was one storey above the all-night van depot, where revving diesel engines and their inexplicably shouting drivers contributed to a constant hideous din?

Actually, I think we could have borne it all if we hadn’t been forced to spend twelve hours in the room, having no where else to pass the evening after 7 pm.  The only food available in the old city was the sort of street shawarma that’s kept moist by sweat and carbon monoxide, so we ate digestive biscuits for supper and waited for morning.

Thankfully, morning did eventually arrive, and despite the night’s travails, the next day was very enjoyable.  Stay tuned.

Let me preface by saying that I think quite highly of the series, and suspect it’s as accurate a depiction of battle during the first half of the 20th century as has ever been made.  It’s moving, horrifying, and eye-opening, and I invariably watched it with brain abuzz.  The very fact that I can’t stop thinking about it means that it’s up to the task of skeptical close examination.

But I’m troubled.  I haven’t yet decided how well the writers dealt with one major element of the “Pacific theater” of WWII: how Americans saw the Japanese at the time.  Nazis, though loathsome, were white men gone astray, but “Japs” were a monstrously irredeemable breed that even proto-hippie Dr. Seuss dehumanized completely in his WWII political cartoons.  In The Pacific, the usual epithets are flung about, but the depths of the pervasive racism are not really explored.  And given the fact that the climax of the whole series centers on the main character becoming bitterly obsessed with the notion of killing every last “Jap”, and then experiencing a moment of sanity in which he realizes his folly, it’s not as though racial difference is simply irrelevant.  Of course, I recognize the thematic limitations of a miniseries, as opposed to a multi-season serial (or a book), and I’m not generally one of those people who expects films to squeeze everything in the name of accuracy, but it’s clear that the show’s makers erred on the side of subtlety when it came to dramatizing how the Japanese became a completely debased enemy.  The Pacific is, after all, about unadulterated valor, is it not, on the part of The Greatest Men That America Ever Produced?  To dwell in too great a detail on the amped-up xenophobia of the time was perhaps deemed a tad gauche given the context.

(Maybe this wouldn’t even have occurred to me if it didn’t remind me of the hysteria in the West today about Muslims, and the prospect of a future narrative in which pop-culture tells of an embattled West and a nihilistic Islam as a completely one-sided affair.  But I digress.)

Speaking of the context, during that one scene (if you’ve seen the mini-series, this scene is tattooed on your consciousness like a jackboot to the head) in which drawling, crazy-eyed Private Snafu is plunking pebbles into the lidless, still-attached skull of a dead Japanese soldier, while other companies drag their exhausted bodies up the hill to almost certain death, I was reminded of a similarly gory film with a surprisingly analogous plot: a young man withstanding indescribable bodily harm and terror and dying as a martyr on our behalf.  I speak, of course, of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.  I’ll admit, I sort of half-watched The Passion, partly out of a flinching disgust and partly because it was also, paradoxically, a little boring.  But I vividly remember the criticisms of the film, among which this one seems particularly salient now: that the unrelenting and graphic violence and sadism became the only narrative.  When it comes to imagining Christ’s last hours, a lascivious fixation on tearing flesh and oozing blood are evidence of a twisted mind (Gibson’s) bent on exploiting the audience’s visceral reactions to the violence in the name of purported religious faith.  Are Spielberg and Hanks, as enamored of the gospel of WWII heroism as Gibson is of the New Testament, guilty of the same excesses?  What’s the difference?  Historical proximity/certitude?  Relevance to our lives today?  Why is one film accused of being scandalous propaganda, and the other, also grisly in the extreme, a masterwork of realism?

I really don’t know.

I do think, however, that The Pacific is a meant as a sort of object-lesson in why the U.S. had no choice but to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  As the series nears its end, several characters wonder aloud why the damn “Japs” won’t just surrender.  And as this is one of the main logistical (i.e. amoral) reasons offered by commentators for the use of the bombs, one wonders whether the producers of the show, too, subscribed to this reasoning.  It makes no difference to my enjoyment of The Pacific (I’m more worried about my rather high threshold for filmed carnage), but it makes me uneasy to feel complicit in a defense of the annihilation of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians.  Naturally, through the marines’ eyes, the bombs were not just a necessary evil, but a blessing, a decisive, unequivocal moral triumph.  And who could begrudge them that, these men who died at Guadalcanal, Pelelieu, Okinawa, whether their bodies survived or not?  But it’s a risky stance for a TV show to take.

Did I overthink it?

As a Pakistani-American who was raised Muslim, I’ve been abstaining from weighing in on the unrestrained anti-Muslim crusade that has recently metastasized to untenable proportions worldwide, partly because I don’t want to add another decibel to the din, but mostly because it’s hard not to feel utterly demoralized and alienated by the whole thing. What sense can possibly be made of a movement so obviously ill-informed, so outlandishly divorced from the facts and fueled by atavistic rage? Everyone seems to have an opinion, and worse, many people assume a sort of smug expertise–on both sides–on why Muslims are or are not a scourge on the civilized world.

Perhaps this is why even Nicholas Kristof’s recent apology to Muslims, in which he expressed the shame he feels for those of his compatriots who have lost their marbles, fails to really get at the issue. It is on behalf of the “gentle souls” in Islam that Kristof writes, the good ones who “have helped keep me alive, and they set a standard of compassion, peacefulness and altruism that we should all emulate.” Despite Kristof’s commendable attention to this debate, even his efforts fall short because they deny a reality that’s conspicuously absent from the wide array of commentary: the utter ordinariness of Muslims.

It needs to be said. Muslims are most notable not for their supposed rejection of modernity, their distrust of the West, their perpetration of cruel and inexplicable crimes against women, and their global lack of education (all of which are apparent truths that even liberal advocates feel compelled to mention in the name of “balanced reporting”), nor for their individual and systematic charity, their historic accomplishments, their ability to thrive communally in the most hostile environments, and their destruction at the hands of invading military powers.

No, the one statement that can be fairly and accurately made about Muslims, a group of 1.2 billion, consisting of Asians, Africans, Europeans, North Americans, is that there is absolutely nothing extra-ordinary about the vast majority of them. When Americans express wariness about donating to flood relief in Pakistan, it is not the Zardari government they deny, or extremists or the military or honor-killing, Shariah-wielding troglodytes, but the farming and working-class populations of countless towns and villages whose routines differ little from anyone else’s, Muslim or otherwise, anywhere in the developing world.

And if the anti-Islam mania has real consequences besides assaulting the ears and causing heartache to millions of American Muslims, those consequenes are embodied by the sluggish and woefully inadequate response to the floods. More than two months since the flooding began, 20 million people, a full half of whom are children, have been affected by displacement, starvation, and disease, not to mention the decimation of the country’s food supply and livestock, as rivers have overrun their banks by up to ten miles on either side. Deemed the worst natural disaster in the United Nations’ history, the ongoing floods dwarf all other recent natural disasters in every way, except in terms of the amount of aid received.

Many rationalizations have been offered for this discrepancy, from Pakistan’s corrupt leadership to Americans feeling tapped out during the recession. The incentives offered for helping have had less to do with the deserving victims, reduced to subhuman conditions, and more to do with geopolitical strategizing: let’s help them before more of them become terrorists. Tellingly, the old platitude about “winning hearts and minds” made several dubious appearances as U.S. politicians urged Americans to donate to the relief effort. Yet per capita aid remains alarmingly low, less than one per cent of what each victim of Haiti’s earthquake received. Even more revealing, however, is the contrast with the outpouring of aid to Pakistan after the calamitous Kashmir earthquake in 2005, a full twenty-four times more per person affected.

What’s changed since 2005? Why now, the furor across Europe over the ubiquity of halal food and hysterical paranoia over immigration? How to explain the Tea Party’s co-optation and amplification of non-issues into battles for the very soul of freedom and democracy? Why is it suddenly permissible in this country, which the rest of the world used to chuckle at for our unshakable allegiance to political correctness in public discourse, to openly revile Muslims? More to the point, what do we make of the singling out of Muslims as unequivocally determined to bring down the West?

Part of the answer is surely the times we live in. Accustomed as we are in the digital age to the instantaneous and infinite dissemination of ideas (not to mention our taken-for-granted right to post responses to painstakingly constructed arguments online without a moment’s thought), it seems we’re more prone than ever to accepting or rejecting the veracity of a statement before we’ve really considered it. Things start to “feel true” if you hear them enough times.

The war of words against Muslims seems to have been empowered by a case of mass uncritical credulity and pugnacity. “Islamophobia” derives its appeal from the fact that it’s built upon fantasy and delusion, delusion moulded by repetition into “fact” and exploited for political and corporate gains. People who, for example, chose not to help the flood victims, armed with the belief that they hate Americans, have been gravely misled. Not only are flood victims not fixated on the West and bringing about its doom, Europe and America figure hardly at all into their material concerns, so negligible is the West’s relevance to most Pakistanis’ lives, except in the most abstract ways. (This is not unlike how little influence Pakistanis exert on the way Europeans and Americans live their lives.)

These millions afflicted by the flood, like their spared countrymen, are people who, despite Marty Peretz’s preposterous claims to the contrary, exult at the birth of their children, care for their aged parents, enjoy family gatherings, feel bereft when a loved one dies, long for representative governments, and labor under harsh conditions inconceivable to those in the American middle class who claim some sort of access to a mythical “Muslim” psyche.

At its most basic, there seems to be one very obvious commonality among those who effortlessly, and with such conviction, strip the world’s Muslims of individuality and basic human concerns: they have never spent time in a Muslim country. I don’t need to romanticize anything to evoke the value of having grown up in Pakistan, as mercurial a country socially as it is politically, where amid class disparity, egregiously self-serving leadership, and the primacy of the feudal system (to name just a few of the problems ordinary Pakistanis face), I learned the very same lessons that thoughtful members of any society should learn: self-respect, empathy, and a sense of the world and my place in it. These are not uniquely Islamic virtues, but they exist in Islam, among Muslims, with just as much frequency as they do everywhere else.

It’s not enough merely to claim, as many do, that most Muslims (most Pakistanis, most imams, most flood-victims, etc.) are “decent” people. Decency sounds increasingly like a quaint and misappropriated concept anyway, uttered so often by those who espouse bigotry and hate. And saying something too many times can cause it to lose meaning, make us stop thinking about what it really means. That there is nothing unusual about Muslims’ moral sense, their desires and motivations, is precisely why the heated efforts to define Islam’s role in the world, to paint Muslims as exceptional somehow, as possessing a monopoly on any one human quality, is more than just a lot of ugly noise. Its consequences can be measured in human lives.

The fact that this is (merely) a blog makes no difference, partly due to my modest ambitions as a critic and partly to the fact that I would write the same way if I had more readers and a professionally-sanctioned venue to reach them.

So why the guilt?  Maybe because as I was reading last night, rolling my eyes at the main character’s continued flaccidity, I found the quality of the writing quite beautiful.

But also, more significantly, because of last night’s episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.  Several days ago, I read Michelle Orange’s Movieline review of “Going the Distance” and was thrilled to my bones by the following passage about Justin Long:

How a milky, affectless mook with half-formed features and a first day of kindergarten haircut might punch several classes above his weight is a mystery, as my colleague pointed out in her review of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, we are increasingly asked to accept on screen. Long’s fine comic sensibilities and appealing nervous energy seem to have been neutralized by a steady course of protein shakes; an incongruously developed musculature has sprung up in their place. I found myself distracted by the image of him kicking sand in his own face.

It’s funny, it’s spectacularly well-worded, and it’s spot on.  The passage stayed with me for a few days as I tried to turn it into inspiration for some good descriptive writing of my own.  Then, last night (the show plays a day later here in Beirut), Long began telling Jimmy Fallon about how, in reading reviews of his new movie, he found Movieline’s.  Referring to Orange by name, he read the “mook” bit aloud to the audience, citing is as “raising the bar” for insults.  It was comic fodder for Late Night, but clearly something Long had taken great pains to find funny, and quite understandably.

It was this moment, realizing that though I haven’t the slightest allegiance to Justin Long or his no doubt awe-inspiring oeuvre, my heart bled a little for him.

When we review works of art–even those of us who labor under near-anonymity–we do so with a necessary sense of entitlement.  Lord knows there are inhibitions aplenty to contend with.  Once in a great while, I also feel discomfort at what seems to have become one of the enduring faces of arts criticism, the sort of witty dismissal that makes the reviewer sound less like a self-respecting critic and more like a thwarted artist.  It’s an impulse not entirely foreign to my own writing, but one I try to be wary of.