Hot on the heels of For­rest Gander’s appre­ci­a­tion of Eliot Weinberger’s An Ele­men­tal Thing comes this letter* in the new Harper’s:

Eliot Weinberger’s essay “Man­daeans,” which appeared in the May 2007 issue of Harper’s Mag­a­zine, con­tains the fol­low­ing incor­rect state­ments that vilify Mandaeans:

They dis­like the Jews, whom they call “an evil nation” founded by the rene­gade Man­daeans Abra­ham and Moses, a people “who do not agree on a single utter­ance,” who cir­cum­cise with swords and sprin­kle the blood on them­selves, whose hus­bands aban­don their wives and lie down with each other.

They say the Chris­tians have secret rites in which they wor­ship a female donkey with three legs.

They dis­like the Zoroas­tri­ans, who sleep with their moth­ers and sis­ters and eat the dead, who take vows of silence and abort their babies.

These alle­ga­tions are with­out foun­da­tion. Man­daeans hold no such views. Man­daeans do not enter­tain any hos­til­ity toward Jews, Chris­tians, or Zoroas­tri­ans. Man­daeans have noth­ing but good­will toward Jews, Chris­tians, and Zoroastrians.

Nor is it cor­rect to say, as Wein­berger does, that “each year they have a cer­e­mony to honor the Egyp­tians who drowned when the Red Sea closed over them as they pur­sued Moses and the Jews.” This state­ment implies that Man­daeans strongly sym­pa­thize with a tyrant who was pur­su­ing people who were escap­ing from slav­ery. Man­daeans do not hold such views. In fact, the annual com­mem­o­ra­tion of Nuh relates to those who drowned in Noah’s flood.

Some fol­low­ers of John the Bap­tist
via the Internet

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*Sub­scrip­tion required.

a/ Thesis:

I saw a Wash­ing­ton Post head­line the other day, “Who’s No. 2? Obama Keeps Every­body Guess­ing.” No—the “every­body” in that con­struc­tion is you. Imag­ine if you were cov­er­ing the base­ball play­offs and you wrote that there was mas­sive spec­u­la­tion about who was going to win. It’s man­i­festly moronic because you’re writ­ing about a sched­uled event that is going to take place on a known time­line. You’re con­tribut­ing noth­ing. It’s the oppo­site of news; any useful public infor­ma­tion is entirely missing.

(Chris Lehmann, in an inter­view with Ken Sil­ver­stein at Harper’s)

b/ Proof:

From a letter in next month’s Harper’s by Jay A. Stout, a retired USMC Lt. Colonel, writ­ten in response to Ben Metcalf’s “Why I Pay My Taxes”:

Met­calf should con­sider what he writes more care­fully, and leave reflec­tion about taking lives to those of us who have actu­ally done it.

And why not aban­don civil­ian con­trol of the mil­i­tary while we’re at it?

I know: the last thing you need is another excuse to spend more time on the inter­net. But trust me on this one. Wyatt Mason, one of the very best prac­ti­cal crit­ics work­ing today, has started a blog at Harper’s called Sen­tences, and it’s going to be good. Here’s how Mason describes the blog’s focus:

Appear­ing sev­eral times a week, Sen­tences will not patrol the pub­lish­ing indus­try, nor other lit­er­ary blogs. Rather, it will be devoted, for the most part, to things I’ve been read­ing lately, new and old, and the ideas such read­ing stimulates.

Par­tic­u­lar atten­tion will be paid to the par­tic­u­lars of writ­ing, the pieces and parts upon which the enter­prise depends for its effects. Gen­eral ques­tions, too, about lit­er­ary endeavor, will crop up, ques­tions I’ll try to address in a useful way. My aim is to make the posts a con­tin­u­a­tion, if in a dif­fer­ent form, of the writ­ing that I’ve been doing in Harper’s and else­where for the past few years.

Mason’s pro­file page at Harper’s has links to much of his pre­vi­ous work. If you don’t know it, check it out.