Hearts and minds; Garrison Keillor jumps the shark

• Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan discusses a blogger's plan to get key American works translated for Arabic readers.

A fascinating idea, but not without holes. A professor at the University of Michigan, Juan Cole, according to the story, is raising money to hire translators to translate key works of American political philosophy into Arabic for the Middle-Eastern market:

He has in mind the essays and speeches of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Susan B. Anthony; a solid history of American Jews and other minority groups; maybe a few good books, written by American historians, about Iraq. Cole also wants to subsidize Middle Eastern publishers to print these books in large numbers and at low prices, and he wants to pay fees to book dealers throughout the region—just as publishers pay Borders and Barnes & Noble here—to display the books prominently.

Thankfully, this doesn't smack of a PR or business scam (at least not overtly so), but Kaplan does address its major pitfall:

Will Juan Cole's Library of Americana project do that? By itself, no. At best it's the kind of effort that takes years to germinate. It's aimed more at students and intellectuals than at "the street." Whatever impact it has will be trickle-down, not head-on.

Regardless of your political or religious persuasion, it will still take generations of backbreaking effort to undo the damage that has been wrought in the Middle East by shortsighted American foreign policy. That's just the way people are; it's much harder to change a mind, particularly in an elder generation whose ideals are fixed and solidified. Persistence in getting the meat of the American democratic ideal in front of our adversaries is what could eventually make it work, but it seems that it's difficult, if not impossible, to get the current administration to think beyond the narrow sphere of its own interests:

Long ago, the federal government did on its own just what Cole proposes to do. The United States Information Agency—then an independent agency—maintained libraries in Amman, Istanbul, and elsewhere, filled with translations of American political and literary classics. The Franklin Book Program, a nonprofit company with funding from the State Department and private foundations, published hundreds of titles and stocked them in libraries and bookstores all over the world. The Franklin Book Program shut down in 1977, its international board having determined—prematurely, it turned out—that its mission was accomplished. In the 1990s, under pressure from the Republican-run Senate (especially Jesse Helms, then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee), the USIA was absorbed into the State Department; its budget was whacked and its agenda politicized; its libraries were shut down, their books remaindered.

Fear of new ideas isn't limited to a Republican or even a conservative mentality; it's hardwired into the human brain. Horror stories, for example, revolve exclusively around that principle -- that which is unknown is most terrifying. We've got to get these people to lose their fear of the dark.

• At Salon, Garrison Keillor spews a screed against whiny writers.

Keillor does make some points. There's nothing more insufferable than a writer-type who broods and bitches and never actually does anything. I've done it myself, as many of my roommates and regular readers will happily attest.

But.

Setting aside the question of taste, for which there is no accounting, Keillor shoots himself the foot by filling up the article with mindless, ill-thought-out generalizations, and baldly reveals his own middlebrow sensibilities by proclaiming that:

Young people are pessimistic enough these days without their elders complaining about things. Shut up. Life is pretty good when you grow up. You own your own car, you go where you like, and you sing along with the radio or talk to yourself or chat on your cellphone. You pull into the drive-up window and order the Oreo Blizzard. What's not to like?

What?!?

I'm very glad that writing comes so easily for Keillor, and that he's not forced to work a demeaning, soul-draining nine-to-five day job that leaves scant little time for writing solely for oneself, which is what most writers in the world have to do. There are precious few who can put words to paper every day and not have to do anything else to put food on the table. But it's awfully easy, and foolish, for him to lob stones from his high perch. It's easy to write, sure, especially when you're a millionaire with a handful of published novels and a radio show and a regular gig writing columns for Salon. Yeah, it's a breeze.

Nothing that is worth doing is ever easy. Many good comments on the article can be found at Salon's site, with many of them sounding hosannas in agreement, but many more make other and better points about writing. Some point out that attaining the discipline to actually sit down and do the writing is harder than the writing itself. Others make the point that writing might be easy, but rewriting, finding an agent, finding a publisher, getting books on the shelves and simply reaching readers is where the real hard part lies. Keillor's shockingly myopic essay, then, may be the best writing he's ever done; for the very first time, he may indeed have hit a nerve.