Regular read­ers know that I don’t like to get too per­sonal within the con­fines of this blog-​like entity. But I won’t hes­i­tate to con­fess that one of the found­ing arti­cles of my faith is that the state of the world is, as ever, the bane of sane men everywhere.

Today’s proof? Pres­i­dent Bush had to apol­o­gize to Silvio Berlus­coni yes­ter­day for telling the truth:

The Hokkaido G8 meet­ing has pro­duced a diplo­matic faux pas of unprece­dented pro­por­tions. Now George W. Bush has had to apol­o­gise to Silvio Berlus­coni and to the Ital­ian people. But why? To find out, you merely have to glance at Mr. Berlusconi’s biog­ra­phy in the press kit issued by the White House to accred­ited journalists.

“Berlus­coni was one of the most con­tro­ver­sial lead­ers in the his­tory of a coun­try known for gov­ern­men­tal cor­rup­tion and vice”, the pro­file points out.

…Read More…

From “Mao Crazy,” Jed Perl’s review of Cai-​Guo Quiang’s “I Want To Believe” show at the Gugghenheim:

There are times when art should be the last thing on an art critic’s mind. The thun­der­ous pop­u­lar­ity of a number of con­tem­po­rary Chi­nese artists com­pels a polit­i­cal analy­sis. Much of the work is pow­ered by a star­tling and com­pletely delu­sion­ary infat­u­a­tion with Mao Zedong and the Cul­tural Rev­o­lu­tion. This is more sin­is­ter than any­thing we have seen in the already fairly aston­ish­ing annals of rad­i­cal chic. We are wit­ness­ing a glob­al­ized polit­i­cal white­wash job, with artists and assorted col­lec­tors, deal­ers, and syco­phants pour­ing a thick layer of avant-​garde double-​talk over the infer­nal decade of suf­fer­ing, destruc­tion, and death that Mao unleashed on his coun­try in 1966. And as we are also deal­ing with the house of mir­rors that is the art world, I have no doubt that some­body is ready to explain that I am con­fus­ing appro­pri­a­tion with appro­ba­tion or that fas­cism is just another way of spelling free­dom. I must say, the theory people have a lot to answer for. But here is the bottom line: the global art world’s bur­geon­ing love affair with Mao and the Cul­tural Rev­o­lu­tion makes a very neat fit with the cur­rent Chi­nese regime’s efforts to sell itself as the author­i­tar­ian power that every­body can learn to love.

Crazy NYT Ad Week con­tin­ues here at dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion. Today’s install­ment: a group billing itself as America’s Lead­er­ship Team for Long Range Population-Immigration-Resource Plan­ning has an ad on page A15 of today’s Times that lays the blame for America’s envi­ron­men­tal trou­bles at the feet of ille­gal immigrants.

Huh? you say.

Check it out:

[T]he bull­doz­ers keep on coming, rip­ping up some of the most beau­ti­ful farms and forests in the world and turn­ing them into con­crete and asphalt sub­urbs. But with U.S. census pro­jec­tions indi­cat­ing our pop­u­la­tion will explode from 300 mil­lion today to 400 mil­lion in thirty years and 600 mil­lion before 2100, bull­dozer sales should keep on boom­ing. Unless we take action today. The Pew His­panic Research Center projects 82% of the country’s mas­sive pop­u­la­tion increase, between 2005 and 2050 will result from immigration.

Accord­ing to the South­ern Poverty Law Center, the ALTL­R­PIRP is a front for five anti-​immigration groups funded by John Tanton, whom the SPLC and other have called “the puppeteer” behind the modern anti-​immigrant cru­sade. SPLC has named three of these groups as hate groups “for their links to white suprema­cists and pub­li­ca­tion of big­oted materials.”

What’s scary is that a rap­proche­ment between the anti-​immigrant right and the green left is less unlikely than it sounds.

Today’s edi­tion of the New York Times includes a half-​page ad by the National Ital­ian Amer­i­can Foun­da­tion that’s mostly about A. Ken­neth Ciongoli doing his best William Donohoe/Abe Foxman impres­sion. (He’s wor­ried, it seems, that some NBC announcer has slurred Rocco Mediate’s “unsurpassed ethnic heritage” by saying he looks like Tiger Woods’s pool cleaner.) Dumb, but it includes these price­less sen­tences, retyped here for your elec­tronic view­ing pleasure:

[Johnny] Miller seems not to know that in his pro­fes­sional life­time, the pres­i­dents of George­town, Har­vard, Tufts, and Yale uni­ver­si­ties as well as sundry other Amer­i­can insti­tu­tions are cul­tural and ethnic cousins of men named Rocco. In addi­tion, the recent CEOs of IBM, Intel, McDonald’s, Brooks Broth­ers, the New York Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ, the New York Mer­can­tile Exchange, the Philadel­phia Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade have been Ital­ian Amer­i­cans with rel­a­tives named Rocco.