Remember The Speech? The one he called “A Tale of Two Cities.” The one he gave at the doomed 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco, in the midst of the Reagan revolution and the rebirth of the religion of wealth.

You don’t have to depend on nostalgia—you can listen to The Speech on Wikipedia. Something I did after I heard Mr. Cuomo debate Newt Gingrich at Cooper Union last week and give us—or give me, at any rate—a moment that brought back the reason that speech still matters.

Do me a favor: It’s two or three clicks away—listen to it! It’s not some antiquated piece of rhetoric. It’s still powerful and vibrant and moving and restores you to some bedrock sanity about what politics could be about.

He’s still got it. At Cooper Union, he didn’t have the burly physique you see in the visuals from The Speech. But he’s still got what I described—after interviewing him back in the 80s’s—as “linebacker’s eyes.” You don’t want to stray into his zone the way that hapless Panglossian Newt Gingrich did at Cooper Union. If you do, you’ll get your head handed to you.

If you remember The Speech, Cuomo called it “A Tale of Two Cities” in response to a remark by Ronald Reagan, who said he couldn’t understand the people who were going on about poverty and other such problems in America. Didn’t they know America was “a shining city on the hill”?

Yes, in some ways, it was, Cuomo said in The Speech. But there are parts of the shining city the President didn’t see “from the porticoes of the White House.” Parts of the city where people still suffered Dickensian poverty, where people “trembled in basement apartments,” sick but unable to afford health care, parts of the city where hope never visited, opportunity never knocked and dreams died young.

So here was Newt Gingrich, at Cooper Union, surprisingly critical of the Bush administration for its mismanagement of affairs foreign and domestic, apostle of the gospel of scientific management as the solution to everything. Pleased with the possibility that we can make this the best of all possible worlds, if only we’d let people like him—people who knew management theory—manage it.

His prime example—and here is where he unwittingly drifted into Mr. Cuomo’s zone—was the managerial approach to crime. He’d been strolling through Manhattan that day, Mr. Gingrich said, and he’d been reflecting on how successful applying modern management techniques had been in reducing crime. A 75 percent drop since 1993 made New York the safest city in America, and the same managerial techniques had now made L.A. the second-safest city in America.

And you can’t argue with that, or with the props that should go to Bill Bratton, the former NYPD chief who made it happen. And Mr. Cuomo didn’t dispute the stats.

He just got up and talked about walking through a different part of the city. Not Manhattan, where Newt could safely make his way through throngs of super-prosperous hedge-fundsters, I-bankers and M&A hustlers without fear of his wallet being lifted.

Mr. Cuomo said he’d recently been walking the city, too—back to his old ’hood in South Jamaica, where he grew up. And he didn’t like what he saw. Maybe the stats said crime had dropped 75 percent, but Mr. Cuomo said he saw a neighborhood where kids grew up surrounded by junkies and prostitutes, a neighborhood where kids “heard the sound of gunfire before they ever hear the sound of an orchestra.”

Game over. Just one phrase, one inimitable Cuomo locution: They “heard the sound of gunfire before they ever hear the sound of an orchestra.” Anybody going to disagree that still doesn’t happen here? If you want to call this kind of talk “class warfare,” as the Republicans are inclined to do, go ahead. “Yes, there’s class warfare,” Mr. Cuomo said, “and the rich are winning.”

Anybody going to disagree that complacency about a managerial revolution is misplaced when, here in America, Cuomo asserted, 37 million live in the shadows of poverty—13 million of them children? Not to mention the 48 million vulnerable souls without health insurance. Anybody going to try to say that we shouldn’t be suspicious of Newtonian self-satisfaction when there are still “two cities” out there, and one ain’t shining.

I know it sounds so old-fashioned to care about poverty, but Mr. Cuomo brought back the urgency. With one phrase—they hear gunfire before they hear an orchestra—he made Newt look like one of Dickens’ self-congratulatory Social Darwinist fat cats for all the hyper-modern (Pan)gloss he put on his riffs.

Of course, that’s not all Mr. Cuomo gave us at Cooper Union. He once again gave us a virtuoso display of theological erudition, in the service of a vision of political complexity that may be the reason he never became President.

I recall an exhilarating discussion that I had with him during an interview about the relevance of the Pelagian heresy to the validity of the welfare state. At Cooper Union, he took on the question of stem-cell research and made it clear that opposition to it on religious grounds tended to reduce the religious position to a single, simple formulation: Life begins at conception. When, in fact, Mr. Cuomo pointed out that the “religious position” on the question is far more complex: St. Thomas Aquinas posited that life began at 30 days after conception, and St. Augustine believed it was 15 days. So you could favor stem-cell research and still be pro-life. And, suddenly, he had you thinking way beyond partisan bickering to questions about the definition of “life,” the meaning of life. What other politician has that power?

But the great pro-life moment of that debate (Cooper Union wants to hold a series of Presidential debates for ’08) was that line. The one that took us back to “A Tale of Two Cities” and reminded us of what we lost when Mr. Cuomo left public life. That line about kids hearing gunfire before they heard an orchestra.

I’ll never forget it. He’s still got it. We still miss it.

Perhaps the lack of coverage of the attack on the Nobel Prize–winning Holocaust survivor is understandable: It’s one of the most deeply depressing, dispiriting, demoralizing and sickening stories that one can imagine. On every level.

I didn’t read anything about it until a week or so after it happened, when a friend e-mailed me the San Francisco Examiner online account of it. A later report claimed that the police delayed releasing details while they searched for the suspect. The only clue to the cretin’s identity in media reports at the time is from a pseudonymous Holocaust-denier posting on the Web site Ziopedia, which calls itself “anti-Zionist” but turns out to be a cyber-nexus for Holocaust denial.

In case you missed it, Mr. Wiesel, 78, who won a Nobel Prize in 1986 for his memoirs and novels of the Holocaust, suddenly found himself in a microcosmic American nightmare. Returning to his room after a talk at a San Francisco hotel, he was dragged out of the elevator by a demented denier who attacked Mr. Wiesel and started yelling at him that he had to “tell the truth”—the truth, for this sick moron, being that the Holocaust didn’t happen.

According to the poster on Ziopedia (who used the same name as a New Jersey man arrested on Feb. 17 for the crime), the thug planned to forcibly convey Mr. Wiesel—whom he called “the Pope of the Holocaust religion”—into his hotel room (he claimed to have been stalking him for weeks), where he planned to torture him into “confessing” that the Holocaust and Mr. Wiesel’s account of his experiences in it were lies.

Fortunately, the cops intervened before Mr. Wiesel—who survived Hitler—could be tormented by one of Hitler’s modern Mini-Me’s.

My initial reaction was to place the blame on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian president’s dimwit Holocaust-deniers’ “conference”—last month’s convocation of vicious Jew-hating clowns—served, for certain infantile goons, to validate and empower their drooling nuttery.

While it’s true that if Mr. Ahmadinejad hadn’t “enabled” this pinhead punk, Internet filth might have well done it, nonetheless, I think there’s something deeper than the Iranian connection behind this repellent incident.

For one thing, there’s the way that Holocaust denial has become a familiar weapon in the arsenal of a certain element of the “anti-Zionist” spectrum. They use Holocaust denial like Mr. Ahmadinejad does—as part of a strategy to delegitimize the state of Israel preliminary to wiping it “off the map.” The Holocaust deniers have in common with other anti-Zionists the belief that the Jewish state’s only legitimacy comes from the guilt of the West for mass murder. The Holocaust deniers say the same thing, ignoring the fact that Jews lived there for thousands of years and that the Balfour Declaration antedated the Holocaust by two decades—only they just say that the Holocaust didn’t happen; it was a fabrication used to guilt-trip the West.

But, as I said, I’ve come to think there’s something deeper here: I’ve come to think the assault on a Holocaust survivor is an extreme symptom of something very dark, something that extends beyond the sick paranoia of Holocaust-deniers: a subterranean, subtextual anger at Holocaust survivors. A resentment of their presence—because they’re still alive to remind us of our shame, the shame of Western civilization. A civilization that, in perverse form, gave birth to the Holocaust, and at the very least stood aside and allowed it to happen.

Resentment at Holocaust survivors? After all they’ve suffered? Yes, alas: They are uncomfortable reminders in their witness to the depth that human nature can fall to in what was regarded as one of the most highly civilized and cultured nation states in history. They tell us something that we don’t want to know about who we are as a species, and it’s not something that we want to be reminded of.

What’s more, Holocaust survivors are witness to the criminal indifference of the world. And they are Jewish. If only they’d go away.

They’re dying, but they’re still here. Their sight provokes some to physical violence, enrages those who want to believe in the goodness of man and a loving God. If only they’d go away.

Romney: Ignorant or Brain-Dead?

Let me append one further incident that I find in some way related to the attack on a Holocaust survivor by a Holocaust denier, because it involved another kind of denial of the truth—knowing indifference, which is perhaps even worse.

This was the lack of attention that was paid to the fact that Mitt Romney announced his Presidential candidacy at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn Michigan. As far as I know, only the National Council of Jewish Democrats protested the fact that Mr. Romney chose to honor in this way Hitler’s personal idol, the man from whom he absorbed the form and essence of his racist anti-Semitic ideology.

Yes, Ford made many serviceable cars, and his family later tried to make reparations for his worldwide hate campaign. But, as I point out in my book Explaining Hitler, no single person had more influence on the success of Hitler and the Nazi Party than Henry Ford with the influence of his vile publication The International Jew (a modernization of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), his subsidies, and his international validation of murderous anti-Semitism as a modernist creed.

No wonder there was a life-sized portrait of Henry Ford in Hitler’s Munich Nazi party headquarters during his rise to power. It’s unlikely that you’ll find a life-sized portrait—or any hint—of Adolf Hitler in the Henry Ford Museum. But he’s there. Ford’s had less influence on history with his mass-production of cars than he did with his mass production of hate. It’s, as has been said in another context, an inconvenient truth.

It’s funny—while I haven’t read all the reports of the Romney event, I didn’t see any that recalled Henry Ford’s Hitler connection. Some may have, but for most it was too inconvenient, I guess. There were a few reports of the National Council of Jewish Democrats’ protest, but that was all; there wasn’t a single word of protest from any of the other candidates of either party, as far as I can tell.

Could Mr. Romney be so ignorant that he didn’t know Henry Ford’s history? I wouldn’t rule it out. But it’s worse if he did know it and chose the Ford Museum anyway. Some might argue it’s different in degree, but not in kind, from Ronald Reagan choosing the home base of the racist murderers of civil-rights workers in Mississippi as the venue for the first major speech of his Presidential campaign, or laying a wreath at Bitburg, where SS soldiers are buried.

His father, George Romney, was famous for saying he’d been “brainwashed.” The son sounds brain-dead. His Henry Ford appearance was as much of an assault on history, on truth, as the Holocaust denier’s attack on the inconvenient Holocaust survivor.

The man on the phone, in Brussels, was Tennent (Pete) Bagley, for many years a key member of the counterintelligence staff of James Jesus Angleton, the mythical “Good Shepherd” of the highly fictionalized film of that name (allow me to point out that the real Angleton was never in Skull and Bones, although it makes a better story. Allow me also, in the interest of full disclosure, to mention that I’ve been working on a screenplay involving some of these matters for director Errol Morris).

Pete Bagley was present from the very beginning of the still baffling, still divisive Nosenko affair, an unfathomably complex Cold War spy case that caused a bitter, decades-long civil war within the C.I.A. and the entire national-security complex. And one that, according to some—myself included—had hidden repercussions that impacted the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

And Mr. Bagley’s new book, Spy Wars (out in March from Yale University Press), is likely to reopen the old wounds—the name-calling, the bitterness, the deep scars that the Nosenko question has left behind—and reawaken questions of why it is that the C.I.A. seems to have gotten just about everything wrong in its entire benighted history, from the Bay of Pigs to George (“W.M.D.’s are a slam-dunk”) Tenet.

I felt a rare thrill talking to Mr. Bagley, a primary player in the Nosenko affair, after years of reading conflicting versions of the case filtered through declassified C.I.A. historical reviews, Congressional testimony, and listening to certain spies’ and journalists’ accounts. It was a thrill despite the fact that, to my surprise, after reading Mr. Bagley’s book, I realized that I might have to rethink my view of the case. I hate when that happens. No, seriously, I’m grateful to Mr. Bagley for giving us a first-person, hands-on account of his side of the story, replete with a remarkable amount of previously unpublished details of the Nosenko interrogation.

I’ve always been drawn to clandestine spy-world disputes and fascinated by the deeply divisive, deeply ambiguous specter of Angleton, and the Nosenko affair that haunts his legacy. And there was no one more inside the inner sanctums of the case than Mr. Bagley.

Indeed, he was there in a Geneva safe house in 1962 for the first contact between Yuri Nosenko, professed K.G.B. defector, and the C.I.A.

And Mr. Bagley was part of the team that interrogated Mr. Nosenko when he arrived in America, and Angleton and others in the C.I.A. began to suspect that he was a K.G.B. plant, a “false defector.” (Of the lurid glimpse of the Nosenko interrogation in the trailer for The Good Shepherd, Mr. Bagley had this to say to me: “Pure horseshit.”)

The J.F.K. Hit, Again

Mr. Bagley’s book, Spy Wars, makes a meticulous case that the prevailing revisionist C.I.A. version of the Nosenko affair may need re-revision, although it may well be that Yuri Nosenko—still alive and living under another name somewhere in America—will take his secrets to the grave.

Why should we care? Well, let’s go back to the Kennedy assassination—yes, that can of worms. It was in the aftermath of the J.F.K. hit that Mr. Nosenko’s case assumed a special urgency, because he claimed to have been the K.G.B. agent most familiar with the Soviet spy agency’s contacts with Oswald during his sojourn in the U.S.S.R., before he re-defected to the U.S. and ended up in Dallas in November 1963.

In the aftermath of the assassination there was heated speculation about whether Oswald’s Russian stay might portend a Soviet hand behind the killer. What might have happened if it turned out that Oswald had killed Kennedy on behalf of the K.G.B.? Some—on both sides of the nuclear standoff—feared the worst.

Suddenly, in January 1964, Mr. Nosenko showed up in Geneva again, and, in return for safe passage to the U.S., offered to reveal all about the K.G.B.-Oswald connection, which he claimed was negligible and certainly not assassination-related. He was prepared to testify before the Warren Commission, but doubts arose about his story and his identity after he arrived in America, and he never testified.

It is here that the Nosenko case branches into two radically conflicting narratives, two conflicting Nosenkos.

There is one narrative—let’s call it Nosenko Narrative A—which is now the prevailing wisdom embedded in C.I.A. official histories of the case, a narrative to which I contributed a rationale: the “notional mole” theory (acknowledged in Professor Robin Winks’ study, Cloak and Gown).

In Nosenko Narrative A, Nosenko, a genuine defector, is suddenly and unjustly called into question by Angleton and his counterintelligence-based cabal because Angleton has come under the sway of a Svengali-like previous K.G.B. defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn. Golitsyn had convinced Angleton that the K.G.B. was going to be dispatching “false defectors” to follow him, discredit his leads and protect the Hidden Mole in the C.I.A. Mr. Nosenko—according to Golitsyn—was the first of the false.

In Nosenko Narrative A, Mr. Nosenko is subjected to increasingly harsh and inhuman interrogation and confinement, even locked up in a “dungeon” for three years, tortured by sensory deprivation and physical, psychological and pharmacological abuse, but still never concedes that he’s a K.G.B. plant. Instead, the holes in this narrative are attributed to the sort of innocent mistakes and memory lapses that may have resulted from his trying to build himself up to make himself seem more important.

Nonetheless, Mr. Nosenko becomes the rationale for an Angleton-led witch hunt that tears apart and paralyzes the C.I.A. in its hunt for the Hidden Mole, and results in destructive rebuffs of genuine defectors, because of a paranoid “sick think” mindset that imagined a K.G.B. Master Plan of Deception and Disinformation that succeeded in befuddling the West—all of which resulted in Angleton’s firing, Mr. Nosenko’s rehabilitation and the triumph of the K.G.B. mole in the C.I.A., who had succeeded in turning the C.I.A. “inside out.” Indeed, some of the cult-like Angletonians were so paranoid that they believed the man who fired Angleton, the one-time head of the C.I.A. itself, William Colby, was the mole. (Mr. Bagley, who doesn’t buy it, nonetheless conceded that he’s heard muttering to this effect.)

My “notional mole” theory posited that former Angleton confidante Kim Philby, his M.I.-6 counterpart in the U.K.—and a notorious Soviet mole himself—had gotten inside Angleton’s head and used a technique dating back to World War II’s “Double Cross System”: planting the false notion that there was a mole in the C.I.A. In my version of Nosenko Narrative A, the fear of this notional (i.e., nonexistent) mole had driven Angleton crazy.

Narrative B and ‘Team B’

Mr. Bagley’s book goes a long way, in my mind, toward rehabilitating Nosenko Narrative B: that Angleton was right in calling him a K.G.B. plant. For one thing, Mr. Bagley reprints—for the first time ever, he says—the Discrepancy List: the substantial objections, not minor memory lapses, that brought Mr. Nosenko under suspicion. (Edward Jay Epstein had previously outlined some of the problems in his book, Legend.) Mr. Bagley also disputes the “myth” that the Nosenko interrogation involved “torture.” He says there was no “dungeon,” and that yelling during the interrogation was as bad as it got. Of the scene in the trailer for The Good Shepherd, where water is thrown over the Nosenko figure’s head, he says, “I wish I’d thought of that”—jokingly, I believe.

In addition, Mr. Bagley has put in some investigative work, making it a point to meet informally with ex-K.G.B. operatives after the end of the Cold War. He believes that they cumulatively paint a different picture of the Nosenko case than my sense had been. Of course, the question of whether former K.G.B. officers can be trusted is open to doubt, particularly when, as Mr. Bagley noted in my phone call with him, “things are getting tighter again”—the U.S.-Russia standoff looks more and more like the old C.I.A./K.G.B. Cold War confrontation.

“‘We’re still working against you,’ one old Chekhist told me,” Mr. Bagley said over the phone, using the original name of Lenin’s secret police. According to Mr. Bagley, a recent study showed that the current Putin government is staffed at the highest levels by an overwhelming number of ex-K.G.B. men (like Mr. Putin himself). Which explains why the former Soviet Union is acting more and more like the former Soviet Union again.

The details in Mr. Bagley’s Discrepancy List that serve to cast doubt on Mr. Nosenko are the heart of his book—and, alas, are far too complex to go into here. But Mr. Bagley makes the best case for Nosenko Narrative B that I’ve seen, and I’ll be interested to see what the advocates of Nosenko Narrative A have to say in response.

Meanwhile, in terms of its effect on the actual history and the endgame of the Cold War, the import of Nosenko Narrative B cannot be underestimated—particularly the influence of Narrative B on “Team B.”

Team B, students of Cold War history will recall, was the array of outside experts on the Soviet Union’s military, economic and strategic intentions brought in by George H.W. Bush in 1976 when he became C.I.A. chief, in order to challenge the C.I.A.’s official estimates of the questions. (Sound familiar?)

I asked Mr. Bagley if I was correct to say that Team B had been influenced by the Angleton post-Nosenko analysis of Soviet capabilities, an analysis that focused on what the Angletonians believed was deceptively coded telemetry—data gleaned from Russian missile launches by long-range technical means.

“Deceptively coded telemetry”: It sounds arcane, but essentially it meant that the Russians were using their Angletonian “false defectors” in order to bolster the disguise of their aggressive, first-strike, surprise-attack nuclear-war-fighting capacity.

Which meant, Team B argued (relying at least in part on Nosenko Narrative B), that the U.S. had to respond by building the equivalent in counterforce attack capability and counterforce defense: ergo, huge defense increases, Star Wars. Sequel: the collapse of the Soviet economy—and the Soviet polity—as it attempted to keep up with us. Ergo: Nosenko Narrative B won the Cold War.

I had come to believe that there might be some truth to this, even though I disbelieved the essence of Narrative B: that we won the Cold War because of a paranoid mistake. Or maybe even a deliberately Machiavellian Angletonian strategy: a deliberate mistake. I have to rethink the whole thing now. I think a lot of people who read Mr. Bagley’s book will. I’ll get back to you when I’ve figured it all out. Again.

By the way, I ended my conversation with Mr. Bagley by asking what he’d say to Yuri Nosenko if he ever ran into him.

His answer: “Don’t shoot.”

I’m talking about the argument over N.F.L. touchdown dances and other outcroppings of fun in this sport that takes itself so seriously.

As the Super Bowl approaches, the sports prudes are at it again. Consider the deep distress with which an otherwise intelligent local sports media columnist reacted to Fox TV’s coverage of a recent playoff game, which featured—brace yourself—repeated cutaway shots of a woman in a cutoff shirt with an NSFW slogan magic-markered on her bare belly.

Just when a shaken nation was recovering from the trauma of the Janet Jackson Super Bowl horror!

But this was far worse: The Janet Jackson incident took place during a half-time show. Here the camera cut away to this deeply, shamefully immoral and frivolous image of a bare belly during the profoundly serious, extremely socially significant game itself! When we should all have been focusing on the tactical shifts of the game plan!

People! Where are your priorities!

What’s really disturbing about this, of course, is the mindset of a purported grownup who can get all exercised about how troubling this is. Lighten up, dude. It’s a game, you’re not covering the State of the Union.

But this isn’t an isolated incident; it’s emblematic of the attitude of the entire National Football League, a bureaucracy of hacks in suits habitually overimpressed with the grandeur of their enterprise, a small-minded bureaucracy which last year issued one of the most laughably stupid rulings in the history of the sport: the ban on what they called “prolonged or excessive celebrations” by players celebrating touchdowns or big plays on the field.

It was this ban, announced last March, that led to the N.F.L. being dubbed the “No Fun League” by players and fans. But the killjoy N.F.L. bureaucrats, in their campaign to extinguish playfulness and joyfulness—because it might threaten their granitic image of the game’s gravitas—seem to be unable to distinguish a football game from a meeting of say, the U.N. Security Council.

True, it would probably be inappropriate if, after exercising a veto in that august chamber, the Russian U.N. ambassador did a “sack dance.” But the N.F.L. and much of the sports media treat it like an equivalent issue.

In fact, as I’m writing this, the Saints’ rookie running back, Reggie Bush, just scored a touchdown for New Orleans against the Bears and—racing toward the goal line after a beautiful catch and run—did a total frontal somersault flip into the end zone for the score, and then went into a complex, slow-motion imitation jog/dance that was both celebration and parody of celebration and totally cool in every respect.

I can picture the entire old-school sports media having a virtual cow when it happened. And, indeed, some did point to Reggie Bush’s conduct in the course of that scoring play as a terrible turning point. In fact, Reggie Bush himself apologized for letting himself get “caught up in the emotion of the game.” And yet emotions are what make great sports clashes different from combat by robots or digital images in video games. Emotions may well be the reason Reggie Bush got as far as the goal line he flipped over in the first place.

I don’t necessarily believe the world needs a micro-analysis of this moment, but, as ESPN’s Mike and Mike in the Morning team pointed out to their credit the day after the game, there was nothing wrong with the flip and the dance; rather, Reggie Bush’s real mistake came 10 yards before he scored, when he turned and taunted the Bears’ scary linebacker, Brian Urlacher, who was futilely chasing him—thus incensing the Bears’ entire team, which went on to win the game.

On the other hand, what made Cassius Clay into the Muhammad Ali we know and love if it wasn’t his daring death-defying taunting of his opponents? The old-school sports establishment came down on him for “prolonged and excessive celebrations,” too. Live by taunting, die by taunting—the game is psychological as well as physical, and sometimes you intimidate by taunting, sometimes you suffer from taunting, but it’s all part of the drama.

Oh, the Humanity!

I had thought the sports-prude attitude had finally died of old age, but look at how everybody got all outraged all over again during the A.F.C. divisional playoffs, when some of the victorious Patriots had the nerve—the unmitigated gall, the shamelessness—to do a victory dance on (sit down so you don’t faint) the San Diego Chargers’ midfield colored chalk logo at the end of the game!

Yes, they disrespected the sacred chalk logo! I swear this sacrilege actually happened and was shown on national TV, and it was as if certain sports commentators’ heads exploded. They treated it like the Saddam execution cell-phone video of sports. Oh, the humanity!

Never mind that the Satanic glee the Pats players were exhibiting was an attempt to mock the sack dance of one of the Chargers players (Shawne Merriman)—so that, in a witty, meta way, the Patriots were exercising a critique of sack-dancery. But instead of applause for their ingenuity, the Patriots got the same old tired condemnation: that they didn’t show “class.”

What gets to me was the careless use of the word “class” and “classlessness,” words that are thrown around by clueless sportswriters writing about this subject. Did Muhammad Ali lack class? No, his grace and wit transcended the jock-sniffing boxing writers.

In fact, it’s kind of obvious to any observer that it’s not about class, but about race. Most often, nerdy white guys who feel inferior to large, gifted, (mostly) black athletes and thus try to find some way to feel superior to them.

Meanwhile, all the opprobrium obscures the fact that touchdown dances are one of the most entertaining and, in a way, athletic aspects of the game. I mean, breathes there a soul so dead that he cannot appreciate the wit of the Ickey Shuffle?

Yet apparently these dead souls abound. Remember the Ickey Shuffle? Everything about it was pure delight. For those who don’t remember, it was one of the first touchdown dances, and it featured a massive 250-pound Cincinnati Bengals fullback named Elbert (Ickey) Woods delicately shuffling his bulk back and forth in a slightly off-center, comically tilting yet debonair, even Fred Astaire­–like fashion.

The subtle mockery of a freight-car-sized fullback performing these dainty little dance movements was a witty wink-and-nod at the cult of massive body violence in the N.F.L. I may have the chronology wrong, but it seemed to me at the time that it was a response to the crude posturing of Mark Gastineau’s dumb-jock “sack dance.” The best touchdown dances belong to the aesthetic of satire. And yet the clueless N.F.L. actually outlawed the Ickey Shuffle! It was dangerous to the extreme dignity of the game.

A short course in end-zone celebrations might have to include the wholesome collective gung-ho variations, such as the Fun Bunch group-jump, where the Washington Redskins’ offense would gather around the goalposts for a choreographed high-five-ish group love-in. And Green Bay’s Lambeau Leap, which soon got old for me thanks to its obligatory quality: Every time someone from the Packers scored, they had to leap into the end-zone stands to be mauled by drunken fans. No spontaneity!

The Ickey Shuffle was succeeded by various versions of the Electric Slide, the elbow-flapping slapstick of the Dirty Bird and the like.

It makes you wonder why the No Fun League encourages soft-core cheerleaders and face-painting fan-geeks, yet puts their players in straitjackets. Come on! The celebratory impulse and gesture are part of the American national character. We don’t need no stinkin’ stiff upper lip. Didn’t we learn anything from Prohibition and the idiocy of Comstockery?

But for innovation and variation, nothing recently has matched the veritable one-man crime wave of touchdown-celebration freak shows courtesy of controversial, much-maligned and (thus) much-traveled star wide receiver Terrell Owens, the bête noire of sports prudes everywhere. Mr. Owens is the guy known for scoring a touchdown and then taking out a Sharpie pen he’d stuck in his socks, autographing the ball and ostentatiously handing it to his financial consultant; on another occasion, he borrowed a cheerleader’s pompoms to celebrate himself. And then there’s Joe Horn, who used his moment of touchdown triumph to demonstratively take out a cell phone and call his family to break the news.

N.F.L. Brain Damage

What’s really outrageous and hypocritical on the part of these No Fun League bureaucrats is that they’ve sanctioned a game where the one thing that is permitted to be “prolonged or excessive”—and reverently celebrated—is vicious, crippling violence.

Recent studies of the cumulative effect of traumatic brain injuries of the kind sustained in concussions by professional football players (as reported in ESPN the Magazine) suggest that previously neglected brain damage—especially to the pituitary gland—is even more widespread than realized. But the N.F.L. suits are too busy policing end-zone celebrations to do anything about the kind of poorly policed, head-butting, helmet-spearing violence endemic to the league. (They could put a stop to it if they penalized the players $15K as well as 15 yards).

The league winks at violence so it can promote its product with jacked-up, “jacked” violent-hit videos. What fun! Brain damage in the making. It’s O.K. to have fun watching the players’ frontal lobes battered to jelly, but God forbid that they let off a little steam after they make a great play.

In fact, there may be a connection between the two that the N.F.L. suits don’t seem to get. I was talking to a knowledgeable friend who pointed out that in the violent pressure cooker of N.F.L. games, touchdown celebrations are lighthearted ways of letting off steam. And that the ability to let off steam in harmless ways may be a factor in reducing the unnecessarily malicious viciousness of the hits that cause brain damage.

How do we make the No Fun League come to its senses? Somebody has got to make a YouTube video of great N.F.L. touchdown dances. The superb archivists of the game at N.F.L. Films could do it in a heartbeat (maybe they already have). It would demonstrate just how much a part of the game these moments of physical joy are. That athletics isn’t all brute force, but wit and, you know, fun, too.

Bring back the Ickey Shuffle.

He told The Times, for instance, “I may last or I may not last … part of the ability to keep writing over the years comes down to living with the expectation of disappointment.”

It’s Norman Mailer playing Woody Allen, who has also adopted this aw-shucks “my work doesn’t amount to much, etc.” strategy.

But in Mr. Mailer’s case, I have a feeling that he felt someone would step forward and respond to this low-balling by saying, “Yes, but …. ”

Yes, maybe nobody could live up to the kind of inflated notion he once had that he would “change the consciousness of [his] times” with his prose, that he’d run for President, win the Nobel Prize (remember the opening of The Prisoner of Sex, in which he’s waiting for the phone call from Stockholm?). But look what he has achieved: Even if you entirely set aside all the novels, he’s changed the face of American prose--certainly American nonfiction--with Armies of the Night (which, you might recall, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award). He wrote the closest thing to an American prose epic in The Executioner’s Song (another Pulitzer); he broke ground for every memoirist who’s put pen to paper since Advertisements for Myself. He transformed political reportage with his classic account of the J.F.K. nomination in L.A., “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” He made it possible to write about two very big things in a way they’d never been written about before in the first person: Sex and Ideas.

So, since I’m not seeing any of my betters step forward and say the requisite “yes, but … ” O.K., I’ll volunteer.

Big “yes,” to Mailer’s achievements especially for finding a way--both brilliant and comic--in Armies of the Night to write about the personal and the political, the personal and the metaphysical, the personal and the ideological, and even the personal and the theological. Especially the theological, because it’s my contention that the thing people miss most about Mr. Mailer is the theological aspect of his work, the vision of God and the Devil, the vision of theodicy, the problem of evil (my favorite subject) that runs through everything he writes, sometimes to its detriment (at times, I felt he was ventriloquizing theological speculation into his representation of Gary Gilmore’s stream of consciousness). Theological speculation with an exciting, heretical sense of sin--an acutely serious awareness of the consequences of his own sins--of the stakes in those moments of decision we all have to face, the ones that involve love, death and sacrifice. (And, by the way, his most underrated book, the one about the moon launch, Of a Fire on the Moon, said more profound and prophetic things about man and space, technology and Mystery than anything else in the past three decades.)

I’d been thinking of Mr. Mailer even before the new book, because the good people at the Medill School of Journalism in Chicago have asked me, as part of my brief “Distinguished Visitor” stint this spring, to make some remarks about “The Journalism of Ideas,” and you can’t--well, I can’t--talk about J.O.I., let’s call it, without talking about what Norman Mailer made possible.

I’ve always been fond of the title of the late Anatole Broyard’s memoir of coming to the Village in the 40’s and plunging into the literary life of his time: When Kafka Was the Rage. When I came to the Village at the tail end of the 60’s, Mailer was the rage. I’d already been turned on to his work in college, when I’d read the original 1967 Harper’s magazine version of Armies of the Night, which opened my eyes to the possibilities of nonfiction prose. (In that book, he manages to create a character--himself--who partakes of both Falstaff and Hamlet; no mean trick). And then, after I lucked out and found myself with a staff writer’s job at The Village Voice (a paper Mr. Mailer co-founded and named) and a contributing editor post at Harold Hayes’ Esquire (where Mailer had published “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”), he certainly was the rage to me. Not the only one: The contemporary nonfiction world seemed filled with people who were doing things nobody had done before, from Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and Truman Capote, to unique eccentric geniuses like Terry Southern, Paul Krassner and Hunter Thompson. And, in the daily papers, a miracle three times a week: Murray Kempton!

But what appealed to me about Norman Mailer is that he managed to validate, turn into a unique art, the fusion of memoir and metaphysics, J.O.I.--and to do it with joy, with the joy of a comic novelist, to have gleeful fun with the storytelling (the aspect of Mr. Mailer’s work even more overlooked than the theological is the fact that he can be very, very funny, often at his own expense, and yet manage to be deeply thought-provoking as well).

When I was briefly attempting to teach seminars on “literary journalism” (a term I had problems with, preferring J.O.I.) at Columbia’s journalism school, I felt that I could at least accomplish something if I convinced my students to read Armies of the Night. It’s one of those books that holds up every time I reread it, often for different reasons. (The way In Cold Blood does, for instance, the latter becoming more a pure novel whose unuttered, always-present questions are about fate and theodicy--why believe in a God who permits hideous evils to happen to His most sinless true believers?)

But you read Armies of the Night (which was subtitled, a little cumbersomely, “History as the Novel, the Novel as History”), and suddenly you see how all Mr. Mailer’s superb technical gifts as a novelist--especially the ability to bring a social world into being--are brought to bear on “what happened” in history. Shot through with the superb speculative intellect of the thinker doing the writing, it’s just thrilling, pure literary and intellectual pleasure to read. The way, for instance, that Mr. Mailer manages to situate the decision whether to answer the phone at the opening of the book in a psychic, social and ideological landscapes, and the web of connections between them that simultaneously becomes hilarious and suspenseful--it’s Balzac, Proust and Walter Benjamin on a conference call. (It’s History calling.) Or the way he turns literary figures like Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald into great characters. He was one of the first and best to write about the seductions and corruptions of celebrity in an age of mechanical reproduction.

But I’m not here to do an exegesis of Mr. Mailer’s methods and prose (get it from the horse’s mouth in The Spooky Art). And I’m not suggesting his is the only way to write about ideas. Observer readers know I’m also a partisan of the less subjective methods of Lingua Franca, for instance. I just have this personal fascination with Mr. Mailer’s methods and his vision, perhaps because I’m someone who is more than slightly obsessed with theodicy (the attempt to rationalize the presence and often triumph of evil with belief in a just and loving God, the problem that Leibniz claimed he solved--a solution Voltaire famously ridiculed in Candide).

Both the origin and the fate of Mr. Mailer’s theodicy are as interesting as the thing itself. Indeed, I’ve always wondered about Mr. Mailer’s account of the origin of his vision. As I recall it, he had this vision that he has often said is at the very heart of all his work--a vision he would later channel through the voice of the pimp Marion Faye in The Deer Park, through the voice of Gary Gilmore in Executioner’s Song--while he was doing a lot of flying on the wings of Benzedrine and cannabis.

Whatever its origin in Mr. Mailer’s mind, his theodicy has a very contemporary parallel in a strain of post-Holocaust theology, post-Holocaust theodicy--a strain often attributed to the theologian Irving Greenberg. (It’s often forgotten that Mr. Mailer was one of the first non-theologians to speculate about the unconscious cultural impact of the Holocaust in the 50’s. The first sentence of his controversial essay “The White Negro” declared: “Probably we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps … upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive … in these years.”) I wondered whether Mr. Mailer had read Greenberg or about him--and whether or not it recurred to him on pot, the vision was already seeded there, so speak. And that Mr. Mailer, in his way, would prefer a Bad-Boy version of how he came to the most fundamental idea of his career, rather than admit to getting it from a guy named Irving.

What is this theodicy? You could call it God-in-struggle. It’s a response often now made to the very powerful philosophical argument against theism put forward in the 1950’s by J.L. Mackie, who argued that God could not be both all-powerful and just and loving. Because if He were all-powerful and just and still permitted the murder of, say, one million children who had no chance to sin before they were slaughtered in the Holocaust--well, such a God, such a belief, is unsustainable. How to still believe in God? One solution advanced recently (at least half-seriously) by the always-provocative thinker Jim Holt (in Slate) is to believe in a God who is “100 percent malevolent but only 80” percent effective.

Another solution, for those who want to believe in a non-malevolent God, is to say “O.K., he’s loving but not all-powerful.” In some versions, he’s just a struggling weakling (i.e., in When Bad Things Happen to Good People).

I’ll never forget what the Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer said to me when I asked him this question in his Jerusalem office while I was working on my book, Explaining Hitler. What Bauer said is that he had no use for this weakling God. He put it more colorfully, saying of this vision of a God who permitted the Holocaust: “If He’s all-powerful [and he allowed Hitler to kill a million children], he’s Satan. If he’s just but not all-powerful, he’s a nebbish.”

A nebbish? I asked.

“Well, you know, a poor chap who has to be supported, a God who needs to draw his strength from us, this is [Irving] Greenberg’s idea …. I don’t need a God like that.”

But Norman Mailer does, sort of. This is how he puts it in a 1958 interview that is reprinted in Advertisements for Myself. He called it a notion “so central and so shattering that its religious resonances … are going to dominate this coming century … it’s that God is in danger of dying. In my very limited knowledge of theology, this never really has been expressed before …. Man’s fate being tied up with God’s fate. God is no longer all-powerful … the moral consequences of this are not only staggering, but they’re thrilling; because moral experience is intensified rather than diminished …. It’s the only thing that explains to me the problem of evil … that God Himself … can abuse our beings in order to achieve His means.” He doesn’t see his God as a “poor chap”. He sees him as an amateur boxer, determined, embattled in a cosmic “Thrilla in Manila” with the Devil--but on the ropes in the last rounds. He sees his God, it must be admitted, a bit like Norman Mailer, the incorrigible pugilist. Mr. Mailer once said that the last thing he wanted to be thought of in life was “a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.” But in a way, he is--if not exactly nice at all times (though I’ve never found him otherwise the few times we’ve met), then in the way he’s made it a mission to rescue God from Yehuda Bauer’s contemptuous dismissal as a nebbish. The Ultimate Nice Jewish Boy thing to do.

He doesn’t see this as endorsing a satanic God or a weak god, but a God who is always in struggle, in a titanic struggle with the Devil--and, most importantly, a belief that every act of human courage (however you want to define it) strengthens God and weakens the Devil. And every act of cowardice has the opposite effect.

It is--and this is where people don’t get Mr. Mailer and his fascination with sin--an incredibly demanding, hyper-vigilant moralistic view of human conduct. Every failure--and he is relentless in detailing his own failures--contributes not just to lowering your own self-esteem, but to weakening God Himself! It’s self-important, some might say, but undeniably important. As is Mr. Mailer. Which is why, despite his own doubts, I think he’ll last.

Postscript:

I really didn’t want to trouble Mr. Mailer on his 80th birthday, but after I finished this column, I thought I ought to call him and see if he had a few moments for me to check on the importance of his theodicy--and its origin.

When I reached him at his Provincetown place, I asked him, “Am I right in thinking this vision of God and man you spoke of in that interview in Advertisements for Myself imbued your work ever since?”

“Absolutely--oh, ever since then,” he said. He told me about the circumstance of that interview: how he’d been thinking about this vision for a while but had never spoken of it in print until he went to Chicago to speak with novelist Richard Stern’s classes, and how his rapport with Stern and the presence of Mailer’s friend, Bob Lucid, had loosened his tongue.

“Had you been reading theology before?” I asked him. Not much, he answered. He said he “wouldn’t be surprised if some third-century B.C. Greek philosopher had thought of something like” that vision of an embattled God, but that it didn’t come from reading Irving Greenberg. He did, however, now recall something else that had been on his mind.

He remembered an obscure film “about, I think, Channel Island fishermen, called God Needs Man. I don’t even remember what it was about, but that title stayed with me--God Needs Man.”

But he wants to clarify something: that he wasn’t thinking of a two-sided Manichean struggle for the soul of man. That it was, for him, more complex than that--a three-way thing:

“I’ve said it in so many ways, but finally I just feel we live in a triangular relation with God and the Devil, that we’re a separate force. It’s not that we’re little puppets pushed around by an anode pole and a cathode pole. We push back on each of them. So it makes for a very complex universe, a complex moral universe, because you never know at a given moment whether you’re doing it [acting, “pushing back”] as a human or whether you’re being tricked by one or the other of two opposed deities.” Whether you’re an unknowing Agent of the Other Side. “It explains a lot to me when you look at it that way,” he said. It explains, for one thing, the kind of fascination Mr. Mailer displays for double agents and moles in books like Harlot’s Ghost.

“We push back on each of them.” That’s what I like about Mr. Mailer’s work. He’s still at odds with God and the Devil, still trying to figure out who’s tricking whom. Keep on pushin’, Norman.

I must admit I feel a certain satisfaction in discovering that—for once—the entire world affirms my affinity. But what is it about the worldwide appeal of CSI: Miami? Watching a 13-hour marathon recently (I love the recent trend toward all-day marathons of shows like the Law & Orders) sufficiently heightened my awareness—or deranged my senses—to the point where I’ve developed a theory about the strange universality of CSI: Miami’s popularity. A theory involving Zoroastrian theology, which requires some explanation, which I promise will be forthcoming.

But first we must contextualize CSI: Miami in the light, so to speak, of The New Darkness. Long-form “quality TV” Darkness.

Now I have nothing against darkness; I’m dark. You know—dark as in pessimistic, as in things are always going to get worse, as in worst-case-scenario dark. But I’m not nearly as dark—in the sense of portentously poorly lit—as “serious” TV these days, where it seems requisite that indistinct characters drift through a swampy visual murk that makes shows like the Law & Orders, The West Wing, 24 and Rome seem like they were shot at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal.

I know I’m not supposed to use this trope anymore, but I can’t resist: On “quality TV,” Darkness is The New Black.

Darkness has become a signifier for deepness, for deep seriousness—most often a substitute for it, alas. I mean it works for me on the Law & Orders, the permanent midnight lighting, but it became a virtual joke on The West Wing, where the murky shapes of the smug White House yuppies sailed through a sea of gloom whose darkness was meant, I suppose, to make their labored witticisms seem “bright” by comparison.

You know, I’ve been in the West Wing (as a reporter), and the East Wing too, and it just ain’t that dark. They use bulbs brighter than 40 watts! The dim bulbs are the people.

And don’t get me started on 24. They seem to have abandoned incandescent light entirely. The whole supposedly fearsome, high-tech “Counter Terrorist Unit” seems lit by flickering aromatherapy candles. Ooh, scary, kids! All those terrorists might blow out our lemon-and-ginger-scented counterterrorism candles! (No wonder they were in the dark about this season’s nuke.)

Actually, it’s better not to cast any more light on the darkness of 24, since its painfully contrived, phony cliffhanger plot devices couldn’t stand the light of day.

24 is another instance in which darkness signifies—but fails to deliver—“stylishness.” So noir, dude! Can’t you tell it’s, like, more cinematic than other TV?

It’s the cheap way of distinguishing “quality TV”, “long-form TV” from Old-Style TV cheesiness, and the game-show/sitcom bright lighting associated with most of the tube’s product. You don’t necessarily have to make the drama better, just darker.

Because dark is profound; you know that, right? Dark is deep! Were I not above childish wordplay, I would be tempted to dub the new faux-serious quality TV “PooTube.”

But you know the one place that darkness really works for me? CSI: Miami. “CSI: Miami?” I can hear some say dubiously. Yes! It’s famous (sort of) for its luminescent colors, its orange sunset light, David Caruso’s orange head of hair. Not for its darkness. But it is dark.

It’s been all too glibly—and mistakenly—conflated with the light and colors of Miami Vice, the neon, fluorescent peacock pinks and emerald ocean greens. But if you look at any given moment in any given episode of CSI: Miami, what you’re likely to see is darkness—much of the time, most of the surface of the screen is virtually black. It’s a way of highlighting the light, yes, you could say that, but even the light is different.

Shadowlands

If you see light, even in daylight, what you are likely to see is glimpses, gleams of light in a virtually all-dark screen, a deeply shadowed or chiaroscuro-patterned background. Sunset light. Dying light.

There’s a line in Robert Stone’s luminescent new memoir, Prime Green, in which he describes his experience aboard a Navy ship cruising down to Antarctica. He depicts the refracted illumination down there amidst the massive, gleaming ice floes as “strangely referred light.”

I love that phrase, “strangely referred light.” That’s what makes CSI: Miami so mesmerizing to watch, the infinite variety of “strangely referred light” they deploy. It makes Miami Vice’s light seem garish, obvious and pedestrian—quotidian—by comparison.

On CSI: Miami, all you see is glow, pale fire’s reflection rather than direct solar gleam. CSI: Miami is the moon to Miami Vice’s sun, the occluded, luminous incandescence to its glaring fluorescence. Reflected, refracted, indirectly shadow-sculpted light. Escaped light. Fugitive light. Light that makes the darkness even darker than the knee-jerk darkness of “quality TV” darkness.

But what does this have to do with Zoroastrian theology and CSI: Miami becoming the most popular TV show in the world? Okay, it’s a tentative hypothesis, but here goes—here’s where Zoroastrianism comes in.

First, think about it: most popular in the world. That’s got to be both broad and deep interest. Lost and Desperate Housewives are numbers two and three on the BBC list, and there’s a Colombian soap opera at number four called Te Voy a Ensenar a Querer or I Will Teach You to Love.

By Zoroastrian appeal, I mean the way CSI: Miami seems to reach out and touch people on some deep, universal, perhaps unconscious level. Zoroastrian because the religion—one of the oldest in the world, now dying out, its dying light only worshipped by a couple hundred thousand people mostly in India and Iran—is the Persian sect that many scholars regard as a formative influence on both Western and Eastern religious visions.

There’s a little Zoroastrianism in all of us, according to a leading scholarly specialist in the subject, Mary Boyce, who wrote that “Zoroastrianism is the oldest of the revealed creedal religions, and it has probably had more influence on mankind, directly or indirectly, than any other single faith.”

And how does Zoroastrian theology see the cosmos? It’s all about Light, about the cosmic struggle between Light and Darkness. As I understand it, the cosmos was the product of a pure creator Ahura Mazda (yes, like the car—get over it), a god of Light. This creation, however, is then “attacked by violence and destruction,” just as the forces of light are constantly under attack on the mean streets of the L&O’s and the CSI’s.

Zoroastrians believe all beings can affect the outcome of this battle between the Forces of Light and Darkness by their good deeds and words. Those who fail to do their share for the Forces of Light “fall into darkness.” (Wikipedia makes it sound a little like Star Wars “religion,” I know.)

At the end, though, “the universe will revert to its pure state and all souls trapped in darkness will be released.”

It’s the cop-show religion! The show’s lighting effects thematize (as they say in the comp-lit departments) the moral drama. Creation is under such relentless attack from the forces of darkness that Light has to go into hiding—go undercover—and can only be seen in glimpses, mainly orange, burnt orange, reflecting the decline of the burned-out Sun at the end of the day.

The real drama of CSI: Miami has less to do with nailing perps through science than it does with the pervasive background drama of light versus darkness, of light literally trying to emerge from the dark, fighting a guerrilla war to illuminate some fraction of the world, or at least of the screen.

I know: You’re skeptical. But what else explains the universality of CSI: Miami, the fact that this particular American cop show has become, after four seasons, the most popular TV show in the world? I think it has something to do with some deep commonality that transcends nationality and sectarian differences. One that goes back to the original source, the river from which all the other spiritual streams branched off, the deeply rooted Zoroastrian preoccupation with the struggle between Light and Darkness. It’s a cop show, its superficial plotlines are no more profound than any other cop show, it takes place in super-trendy Miami—but on a deeper level, the one beamed to the collective unconscious, its real plot is a spiritual drama about Light versus Darkness.

I don’t want to downplay David Caruso’s role in the success of CSI: Miami. It’s true, many can’t abide him. But I always liked his New York detective Zen stoicism, in NYPD Blue, and the whole tough-guy compassion thing. (And I’ve got to be loyal because of redhead solidarity.) So don’t discount Mr. Caruso. You have to admit he invented something back in that first season of NYPD Blue with his whole “I want to reach out to you” act. He reached people, and I think he still does (plus his hair is now color-coordinated with the show’s orange sunset light).

Yes, CSI: Miami’s mandatory quirks can be parodiable. There’s a funny YouTube compilation of Mr. Caruso’s often-lame opening sunglass-donning wisecrack moments. But he’s gotten more philosophic charisma with age: He’s put on metaphysical as well as physical weight.

It’s certainly not the gimmicky CSI scientific forensics angle on things. I never got into the original Las Vegas CSI or the newest, New York–based CSI the way I have the Law & Order spin-offs: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and the new one, Law & Order: Extreme Parking Violations (kidding).

No, I think what has made CSI: Miami universal, trans-lingual, cross-cultural, are the spiritual and sensual factors: that drama of light and darkness, the drama at the heart of what many regard as one of the world’s first organized religions, Zoroastrianism, a common denominator of all faiths.

And the sheer sensual beauty of the images on screen. I have to admit I was mesmerized by the 13-hour marathon (brainwashed, some might say—but my brain was washed by such a succession of beautiful light-sculpture images). Yes, I know: Most of the show is shot in L.A., not Miami. But the directors of photography on CSI: Miami (Cynthia Pusheck, Robert Hayes) have taken TV images to a new level; they’ve given us a gloomy Miami of the mind. Not permanent midnight but permanent sunset. In the haunting words of the Dylan song, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

The atheists are on the offensive, one might say, with Daniel Dennett’s latest book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon—an attempt to reduce religion and spirituality to a by-product of evolutionary biology. And Dawkins’ The God Delusion, which debunks the conventional monotheistic notion of God without supplying an alternate answer to the question of how the universe came into being, the ancient mystery: Why is there Something instead of Nothing?

On the other hand, defenders of religion, of the very idea of a God, are hard-pressed to explain the cruel, unholy chaos and suffering that pervades a world supposedly created by a loving God.

Neglected in this simplistic bipolar debate is the position staked out by the great Nobel Prize–winning novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, which emerges more clearly in the biography by Florence Noiville, Isaac B. Singer: A Life, just published in English.

It’s remarkable, however, the way commenters on the new Singer book have failed either to grasp or to articulate the seriousness of Singer’s position, its centrality to him and his work, and the significance it has for the atheism/theism debate.

None has seen fit to give a name to Singer’s Third Position in the debate. So I will: It’s not atheism, not theism, but rather anti-theism, a provocative, profoundly different stance from either of the others. Simply put, contrary to the atheists, Singer believes in a God, but, contrary to the theists, he doesn’t believe in a just, loving or merciful God; he believes in a God who doesn’t deserve worship, a God who deserves our condemnation.

Why has the significance of Singer’s position been lost in the shuffle? Sometimes we get so buried in second-order cultural trend-spotting, in cultural self-examination, re-evaluation—aren’t we on the re-evaluation of the re-evaluation of the re-evaluation of Hannah Arendt at this point?—that certain genuinely exciting first-order developments get lost in the culture wars’ fog of battle.

The new Noiville biography of Isaac Singer is an instance, a slim book that nonetheless advances the growing case that there were in fact Two Singers—and Two Songs, you might say. There was the Original Yiddish Singer and the Easy-Listening English Singer, you might say. (Singer called his transformed English translations “second originals.”)

There’s the familiar warm-and-fuzzy Fiddler on the Roof Singer that brought him an international audience, beginning with Saul Bellow’s translation of his shtetl fable, “Gimpel the Fool,” in a 1953 issue of Partisan Review.

But then there’s the other Singer, Singer the Yiddish writer, the Singer before Singer bowdlerized himself in the course of “supervising” the translations of his works from Yiddish into English. The Original, Yiddish Singer was engaged in a bitter, blasphemous battle with God. The kind of strife he frequently sought to smooth over, self-censor in the English translations of his works.

This was something I’d written about before in connection with the discovery in the Singer archives of a brutal and sexual Yiddish gangster novel he’d written called Yarme and Keyle. Back then (in The Observer, March 10, 2003), I wrote about the controversy that ensued over whether Singer would have wanted some of his Yiddish works translated into English after he died, without his “supervision,” presumably to make them more “palatable.” What appeared to be his desire to keep the two Singers separate.

And it’s probably no accident that the Singer novel that shook me up most viscerally was Shadows on the Hudson (extremely faithful readers may recall my three-part serialized review of Shadows back in 1998). Shadows was the first novel translated from the Yiddish without Singer’s “supervision,” and we got more of a sense of the raw anger at God, the bitter imprecations, the struggle that ravaged him and his characters.

In Ms. Noiville’s biography, there is further evidence for the separation of the two Singers, more harsh outcries against God from the Yiddish Singer.

Consider the remarkable statement that Ms. Noiville has found in an obscure interview with Singer back in 1978, one that reflects views which she contends Singer had been expressing as far back as the 1920’s, though mainly in Yiddish.

She uses it to illustrate what she calls “Singer’s ‘ethic of protest,’ a philosophy that would be his to the end … the point was to show God that he [Singer] disapproved of the way He ran the world, disapproved of His silence and absence of compassion …. Singer insists that because God is evil, man should behave in a moral way … ‘to spite God.’”

Then she quotes from the obscure interview (done in 1978, first aired on Swedish TV in 1985), in which Singer says, “I often say to myself that God wants us to protest. He has had enough of those who praise Him all the time and bless Him for all His cruelties to man and animals.

“I have written a little book which I call Rebellion and Prayer, or The True Protester. It is still in Yiddish, untranslated. It was written at the time of the Holocaust. It is a bitter little book, and I doubt that I will ever publish it. Yes, I am a troubled person …. If I could, I would picket the Almighty with a sign: ‘Unfair to Life.’”

One thing it does is answer the question that seemed to puzzle one reviewer of Ms. Noiville’s book: Why was Singer so “agitated”? Clearly (as any reading of Shadows on the Hudson makes evident as well), what agitated him was his anger at God—and the vexations of theodicy, the subdiscipline of theology that wrestles with the difficulty of reconciling an all-powerful God who is also supposed to be just and merciful.

How one can believe in a just and merciful God who apparently countenances the persistence of evil and unmerited suffering on a vast and catastrophic scale? It would be enough to “agitate” any serious person.

And by the way, now that we know about it, that “bitter little book” Rebellion and Prayer—what happened to it? Wouldn’t you like to read it? Shouldn’t someone translate and publish this key philosophic vision of one of the great writers of the past century? Or should we follow his (apparent) wishes and leave it to languish in Yiddish? Would we then be denying English-only readers of Singer a deep truth about the writer they profess to love?

It reminded me of the kind of controversies over the differing texts of Hamlet and King Lear, controversies which I explore in The Shakespeare Wars. Do the two different versions of Lear’s dying words represent two profoundly differing visions of the play—or of the playwright himself and his view of the moral order of the universe?

Indeed, Ms. Noiville offers two different versions—one Yiddish, one English—of the ending of a Singer story called “The Mirror” that differ in some respects like the two different endings of Lear.

In the Yiddish version, the narrator, a tormented imp, tells us “All the worlds are vile fungi …. Everything was and remains mere confusion, emptiness, and chaos.”

These harsh sentiments are softened beyond recognition in the English translation that Singer “supervised,” and all that’s left is mild questioning: “Is there a God? Is He all merciful?”

As Ms. Noiville exclaims after quoting the two versions: “What a difference!”

But to return to the renewed debate in the culture over atheism initiated by Messrs. Dawkins and Dennett: If Singer seems to offer a Third Way between theism and atheism, there is in fact a Fourth Way.

One that was articulated by my friend Errol Morris, the director of The Fog of War, with whom I’ve had a running series of conversations about what might be called “The Fog of God,” the dilemmas of theodicy as first adumbrated by Leibniz in his 1709 Theodicy, a much-misunderstood book that Errol and I are both fond of.

In any case, one recent winter weekend morning, I took a cab downtown to the Mercer Hotel to have breakfast with Errol and his wife Julie. I brought with me a copy of the Noiville book, and before I ordered my fried eggs I had to read Errol the passage from Singer’s Swedish interview about the “bitter little book” Singer wouldn’t allow to be published in English, his “agitation” (“Yes I am a troubled person,” troubled by God’s responsibility for “the mess in which we are stuck”) and the need to protest, to picket, the Almighty for His injustice to man.

Errol, who is an admirer of the Dawkins book and had, after all, contemplated the mysteries of creation in his Stephen Hawking film A Brief History of Time, offered a fourth alternative to theism, atheism and anti-theism. He suggested that instead of Singer’s outrage at God for His responsibility for the cruelty and suffering of life, we ought to feel a measure of sympathy for the deity for His ineptness—for what Errol called “The Infinite Mediocrity of God.”

It’s a position that offers some heuristic rewards, at the very least. If God exists (and by the way, I’m an agnostic), one doesn’t have to walk around muttering about God’s failures the way Singer evidently did. One can consider Him a kind of Divine Schlemiel who tried His best but just didn’t do a good job of Creation. Whose “best of all possible worlds” just wasn’t very good at all—not because He was deliberately bad, demonic in the way that some Gnostic sects have portrayed the Creator, but rather because He was just divinely mediocre, supremely inept.

I had long considered “Gimpel the Fool,” Singer’s touching but troubling shtetl fable, to be his allegory of the relationship between the Jewish people and God. The Jews, like Gimpel, are always putting their faith and trust in God’s goodness, and His special care for them, in the same way that Gimpel the Fool puts his faith and trust in his cruel neighbors and untrustworthy wives—all of whom conspired to make him miserable, although he steadfastly refused to blame any of them.

But maybe what Errol’s Fourth position suggests is that it is God Himself who is Gimpel the Fool. Just another theory.

And yet “scholars” is the word used in the Times headline for its Dec. 6 story, datelined Tehran and bylined Nazila Fathi. The headline reads: Iran Invites Scholars to Assess Holocaust as History or Fiction.

One is tempted to say (or to wish) that there was a note of satire in the hed, one that conjured up an alternative Onion-like hed: Iran Invites Scholars to Assess Whether World Is Round or Flat.

But the Times story takes things much more seriously, and at least in certain respects, this is a wise decision: This conference deserves serious attention. It is, alas, not a joke, this convocation of evil clowns summoned by a genocidally-minded regime whose policy it is to perpetrate a Holocaust while attempting to deny that one has already happened.

Serious attention, yes—but what kind of serious attention? Is it the serious attention implied by the headline’s use of the word “Scholars” (significantly, a second story on the conference, published by The Times on Dec. 12, used the phrase “discredited scholars” and remedied some, but not all, defects of the first story) and the verb “Assess” (implying a judicious deliberative dialogue between Holocaust flat-earthers and “the other side”). Is this what being “fair and balanced” means? Equal time for truth and lies? Does the language and tone of the hed impute a legitimacy to this parliament of fools?

Holocaust denial is particularly insidious because one doesn’t want to be in the position of privileging one historical truth or tragedy over another. And yet Holocaust denial is almost always connected with an anti-Semitic, Hitler-friendly agenda. To deny or ignore the existence of this while reporting on “scholars” engaged in “assess[ing]” the matter is to deny the whole truth of something like the Iranian “conference.”

The initial Times story exposes the problems for reporters and editors that both Holocaust denial and Iranian genocidal rhetoric pose to media covering it. The problem it poses to the notion of “objectivity” when covering a malevolent pseudo-discipline like Holocaust denial, especially when it’s sponsored by a state that makes exterminationist threats.

Are you familiar with the Iranian conference of Holocaust “scholars”? The intention to hold one had been announced earlier this year in the wake of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s genocidal threats against the State of Israel and publicly expressed doubts about the reality of Hitler’s mass murder. The phrase “adding insult to injury” doesn’t really do justice to the murderous obscenity of Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Here is how the Times story, datelined “TEHRAN, Dec. 5” and run on p. A5, introduced the Iranian announcement:

“The Iranian authorities, who have frequently accused the Jews of distorting history to legitimize Israel, announced plans on Tuesday for an international conference on the Holocaust.

“They said the conference, to be held in Tehran next Monday and Tuesday, would include more than 60 scholars from 30 countries and would examine a range of issues, including whether the gas chambers were actually used.”

You didn’t realize that was a serious open question, whether gas chambers were used? Nor do serious scientists or historians (a quick, comprehensive account of the abundant evidence for the use of Zyklon-B poison gas for mass murder in the Holocaust can be found online in “The Chemistry of Auschwitz,” by Richard J. Green, www.holocaust-history.org/ auschwitz/chemistry/).

Should the Times account include a reference to the fact that the weight of evidence compiled by all serious scientists and historians confirms the fact that gas chambers were used to murder millions? Does the failure to include this minor caveat leave open an implication that there is legitimate controversy over the question among “scholars”? Would such a statement—that it has been established that gas chambers were used to murder Jews—make the article more objective, more factually correct, or would it open itself to the charge of being special pleading? Or does The Times want to give the impression that it is not yet willing to acknowledge the gas chambers as indisputable fact, but something worthy of “assessment” by “scholars”?

Of course you could say it would be tantamount to insulting its readers’ intelligence to include an assertion that the gas chambers existed. And for most of its readers, that would be true. But there are large areas in the Middle East (and other regions as well) where people take Holocaust denial as Holy Writ, the way that large percentages of people in the Middle East believe the Israelis engineered 9/11. The Times Web site is available worldwide now, so the assumption of the use of gas chambers is not at all taken for granted everywhere it’s read, and pernicious doubt—legitimacy for Holocaust deniers—is spread by refraining from stating the obvious in discussing what the “scholars” are “assessing.”

I’m not saying these are easy decisions or that they weren’t made in good faith. I don’t envy the Times editors who had to and will have to deal with them. I’m just examining some of the implications of the decisions that were made.

Is there a conflict between factuality and objectivity? Is accurately pointing out the fact that millions were gassed in death camps violating “objectivity”—“taking sides”—or is it a responsible corrective to the potential implication that there is a real controversy outside the sick minds of Holocaust deniers?

I’m not saying I know the answer. I’d say the greater problem would be The Times’ apparent unquestioning acceptance in that first story that the conference participants would in fact all be “scholars.” Especially since we learn later in the story that the Iranian “authorities” refused to identify any of them by name. Holocaust deniers often pose as “scholars,” but at what point does their Holocaust denial subvert (if not deny them) the honorific?

Even more important is the way that implicit acceptance of the idea that there is legitimate scholarly controversy over the gas chambers affects the way the Holocaust is described in the succeeding paragraph.

Here we are told that “Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stirred outrage in the West last year when he stated on several occasions that the Holocaust, in which six million Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis, was either greatly exaggerated or an outright myth” (italics mine).

Note the way here that The Times feels compelled to explicitly state that the Holocaust happened: “ … six million Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis.” (It would be more accurate to say that “between five million and six million Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis, according to legitimate scholars.”)

But note also that they do not explicitly state that gas chambers were used, which can leave the implication that although six million Jews “perished at the hands of Nazis,” they may have been strangled, for all we are told. And the choice of such language—“perished at the hands”—in the context of a controversy over the methods used, could sound like a carefully worded suggestion there may indeed be room for controversy over whether gas chambers were used. By labeling one aspect of the Holocaust explicitly factual—the death toll—the failure to label the use of gas chambers factual becomes more noticeable.

And note as well that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statements that the Holocaust was “greatly exaggerated or an outright myth” are not characterized as untrue, demonstrable lies but rather as having “stirred outrage,” something very different. This language about “stirring outrage” is generally used for statements or theories that are controversial but still might be true. Copernicus’ theory that the earth revolves around the sun initially “stirred outrage” but turned out to be true. If Mr. Ahmadinejad had made statements that the sun revolves around the earth in advance of a conference of “scholars” to “assess” his theory, would the Times report have merely said his theory has “stirred outrage”?

The attempt to report on this conference of liars and deniers “objectively” makes it evident just how insidious a challenge to the notion of “objectivity” Holocaust denial is.

It should be remembered (as I point out in Explaining Hitler) that Hitler himself was the First Holocaust Denier. He sought to keep the Final Solution a secret, believing (alas, mistakenly) that if word got out, he would suffer consequences for it from the aroused conscience of the world. Well, word did get out, and despite the heroic efforts of those like Ben Hecht (the journalist and screenwriter who agitated ceaselessly for action to halt the Final Solution as the mass murder proceeded), the conscience of the world remained largely undisturbed.

Almost all Holocaust deniers follow in Hitler’s footsteps, share Hitler’s two-faced view of Holocaust denial: They deny it happened but are glad it did. Mr. Ahmadinejad has taken this one step further, I’d argue: He denies that it happened, is glad that it happened, and wants to make it happen again.

To its credit, the Times report does suggest a connection between the “scholars’ conference” and the genocidal aims of Iranian policy. Debunking the Holocaust contributes to delegitimizing the State of Israel, portraying it as the product of a historical fraud perpetrated on the world, thus diminishing the small amount that the world cares for the fate of the people Mr. Ahmadinejad wants to “wipe off the map.”

But what is one to make of this statement in the Times story: The Iranian spokesman said the conference would “provide the opportunity for scholars from both sides to give their papers in freedom and without preconceived ideas” (italics mine). An endorsement for those who believe there are two sides to the question of whether the earth is flat or round? Is The Times’ certitude about the Holocaust and the gas chambers less than certain?

Perhaps the most puzzling omission, though, was the failure to include a response to any of the deeply disingenuous Iranian statements, such as this one: “The conference does not mean that Iran ‘denies the crimes of Hitler. Since we are not accused and responsible for the Holocaust, we are an impartial judge.’”

Yes, the world’s greatest purveyor of anti-Semitism, constantly threatening to “wipe Israel off the map,” is an “impartial judge.” Reuters, at least, included this response from a spokesperson from a British Holocaust-education group: “Denial of the Holocaust is a virulent form of anti-Semitism. It is not only deeply offensive to Holocaust survivors but to any right-minded human being.” Absent any response in the Times story, the aura of “impartiality” created by calling the likes of David Duke “scholars” begins to seem like partiality.

Where is Ben Hecht?

And yet “scholars” is the word used in the Times headline for its Dec. 6 story, datelined Tehran and bylined Nazila Fathi. The headline reads: Iran Invites Scholars to Assess Holocaust as History or Fiction.

One is tempted to say (or to wish) that there was a note of satire in the hed, one that conjured up an alternative Onion-like hed: Iran Invites Scholars to Assess Whether World Is Round or Flat.

But the Times story takes things much more seriously, and at least in certain respects, this is a wise decision: This conference deserves serious attention. It is, alas, not a joke, this convocation of evil clowns summoned by a genocidally-minded regime whose policy it is to perpetrate a Holocaust while attempting to deny that one has already happened.

Serious attention, yes—but what kind of serious attention? Is it the serious attention implied by the headline’s use of the word “Scholars” (significantly, a second story on the conference, published by The Times on Dec. 12, used the phrase “discredited scholars” and remedied some, but not all, defects of the first story) and the verb “Assess” (implying a judicious deliberative dialogue between Holocaust flat-earthers and “the other side”). Is this what being “fair and balanced” means? Equal time for truth and lies? Does the language and tone of the hed impute a legitimacy to this parliament of fools?

Holocaust denial is particularly insidious because one doesn’t want to be in the position of privileging one historical truth or tragedy over another. And yet Holocaust denial is almost always connected with an anti-Semitic, Hitler-friendly agenda. To deny or ignore the existence of this while reporting on “scholars” engaged in “assess[ing]” the matter is to deny the whole truth of something like the Iranian “conference.”

The initial Times story exposes the problems for reporters and editors that both Holocaust denial and Iranian genocidal rhetoric pose to media covering it. The problem it poses to the notion of “objectivity” when covering a malevolent pseudo-discipline like Holocaust denial, especially when it’s sponsored by a state that makes exterminationist threats.

Are you familiar with the Iranian conference of Holocaust “scholars”? The intention to hold one had been announced earlier this year in the wake of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s genocidal threats against the State of Israel and publicly expressed doubts about the reality of Hitler’s mass murder. The phrase “adding insult to injury” doesn’t really do justice to the murderous obscenity of Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Here is how the Times story, datelined “TEHRAN, Dec. 5” and run on p. A5, introduced the Iranian announcement:

“The Iranian authorities, who have frequently accused the Jews of distorting history to legitimize Israel, announced plans on Tuesday for an international conference on the Holocaust.

“They said the conference, to be held in Tehran next Monday and Tuesday, would include more than 60 scholars from 30 countries and would examine a range of issues, including whether the gas chambers were actually used.”

You didn’t realize that was a serious open question, whether gas chambers were used? Nor do serious scientists or historians (a quick, comprehensive account of the abundant evidence for the use of Zyklon-B poison gas for mass murder in the Holocaust can be found online in “The Chemistry of Auschwitz,” by Richard J. Green, www.holocaust-history.org/ auschwitz/chemistry/).

Should the Times account include a reference to the fact that the weight of evidence compiled by all serious scientists and historians confirms the fact that gas chambers were used to murder millions? Does the failure to include this minor caveat leave open an implication that there is legitimate controversy over the question among “scholars”? Would such a statement—that it has been established that gas chambers were used to murder Jews—make the article more objective, more factually correct, or would it open itself to the charge of being special pleading? Or does The Times want to give the impression that it is not yet willing to acknowledge the gas chambers as indisputable fact, but something worthy of “assessment” by “scholars”?

Of course you could say it would be tantamount to insulting its readers’ intelligence to include an assertion that the gas chambers existed. And for most of its readers, that would be true. But there are large areas in the Middle East (and other regions as well) where people take Holocaust denial as Holy Writ, the way that large percentages of people in the Middle East believe the Israelis engineered 9/11. The Times Web site is available worldwide now, so the assumption of the use of gas chambers is not at all taken for granted everywhere it’s read, and pernicious doubt—legitimacy for Holocaust deniers—is spread by refraining from stating the obvious in discussing what the “scholars” are “assessing.”

I’m not saying these are easy decisions or that they weren’t made in good faith. I don’t envy the Times editors who had to and will have to deal with them. I’m just examining some of the implications of the decisions that were made.

Is there a conflict between factuality and objectivity? Is accurately pointing out the fact that millions were gassed in death camps violating “objectivity”—“taking sides”—or is it a responsible corrective to the potential implication that there is a real controversy outside the sick minds of Holocaust deniers?

I’m not saying I know the answer. I’d say the greater problem would be The Times’ apparent unquestioning acceptance in that first story that the conference participants would in fact all be “scholars.” Especially since we learn later in the story that the Iranian “authorities” refused to identify any of them by name. Holocaust deniers often pose as “scholars,” but at what point does their Holocaust denial subvert (if not deny them) the honorific?

Even more important is the way that implicit acceptance of the idea that there is legitimate scholarly controversy over the gas chambers affects the way the Holocaust is described in the succeeding paragraph.

Here we are told that “Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stirred outrage in the West last year when he stated on several occasions that the Holocaust, in which six million Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis, was either greatly exaggerated or an outright myth” (italics mine).

Note the way here that The Times feels compelled to explicitly state that the Holocaust happened: “ … six million Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis.” (It would be more accurate to say that “between five million and six million Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis, according to legitimate scholars.”)

But note also that they do not explicitly state that gas chambers were used, which can leave the implication that although six million Jews “perished at the hands of Nazis,” they may have been strangled, for all we are told. And the choice of such language—“perished at the hands”—in the context of a controversy over the methods used, could sound like a carefully worded suggestion there may indeed be room for controversy over whether gas chambers were used. By labeling one aspect of the Holocaust explicitly factual—the death toll—the failure to label the use of gas chambers factual becomes more noticeable.

And note as well that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statements that the Holocaust was “greatly exaggerated or an outright myth” are not characterized as untrue, demonstrable lies but rather as having “stirred outrage,” something very different. This language about “stirring outrage” is generally used for statements or theories that are controversial but still might be true. Copernicus’ theory that the earth revolves around the sun initially “stirred outrage” but turned out to be true. If Mr. Ahmadinejad had made statements that the sun revolves around the earth in advance of a conference of “scholars” to “assess” his theory, would the Times report have merely said his theory has “stirred outrage”?

The attempt to report on this conference of liars and deniers “objectively” makes it evident just how insidious a challenge to the notion of “objectivity” Holocaust denial is.

It should be remembered (as I point out in Explaining Hitler) that Hitler himself was the First Holocaust Denier. He sought to keep the Final Solution a secret, believing (alas, mistakenly) that if word got out, he would suffer consequences for it from the aroused conscience of the world. Well, word did get out, and despite the heroic efforts of those like Ben Hecht (the journalist and screenwriter who agitated ceaselessly for action to halt the Final Solution as the mass murder proceeded), the conscience of the world remained largely undisturbed.

Almost all Holocaust deniers follow in Hitler’s footsteps, share Hitler’s two-faced view of Holocaust denial: They deny it happened but are glad it did. Mr. Ahmadinejad has taken this one step further, I’d argue: He denies that it happened, is glad that it happened, and wants to make it happen again.

To its credit, the Times report does suggest a connection between the “scholars’ conference” and the genocidal aims of Iranian policy. Debunking the Holocaust contributes to delegitimizing the State of Israel, portraying it as the product of a historical fraud perpetrated on the world, thus diminishing the small amount that the world cares for the fate of the people Mr. Ahmadinejad wants to “wipe off the map.”

But what is one to make of this statement in the Times story: The Iranian spokesman said the conference would “provide the opportunity for scholars from both sides to give their papers in freedom and without preconceived ideas” (italics mine). An endorsement for those who believe there are two sides to the question of whether the earth is flat or round? Is The Times’ certitude about the Holocaust and the gas chambers less than certain?

Perhaps the most puzzling omission, though, was the failure to include a response to any of the deeply disingenuous Iranian statements, such as this one: “The conference does not mean that Iran ‘denies the crimes of Hitler. Since we are not accused and responsible for the Holocaust, we are an impartial judge.’”

Yes, the world’s greatest purveyor of anti-Semitism, constantly threatening to “wipe Israel off the map,” is an “impartial judge.” Reuters, at least, included this response from a spokesperson from a British Holocaust-education group: “Denial of the Holocaust is a virulent form of anti-Semitism. It is not only deeply offensive to Holocaust survivors but to any right-minded human being.” Absent any response in the Times story, the aura of “impartiality” created by calling the likes of David Duke “scholars” begins to seem like partiality.

Where is Ben Hecht?

I know. You haven’t read enough about the subject, but reaction has been all over the map, and perhaps there’s a value in examining the contours of the map. Beginning with …

Theory No. 1 (my sentimental favorite): Blame Seinfeld, a.k.a. “the unleashed id” theory. I don’t want to say I told you so, but in my many critiques of Seinfeld and its simpering, self-congratulatory smugness in these pages (anyone remember the “Can’t Stand Seinfeld Society” I started?), I often mentioned the show’s smirking mockery of ethnics and foreigners, which amounted to “Ew, these people are so different from us.”

Different never meant interesting; different always meant stupid and laughable. Such comic genius! Always defended in a self-congratulatory way as a daring and brave “challenge to political correctness.” Could it be that it was somehow this matrix of mild mockery that gave license to Mr. Richards’ vicious rant?

Well, it’s a stretch, although this was just about my first thought after I heard about the incident. But it’s only fair to say that the first person I know of to put this theory into print—or online, anyway—was the writer Charles P. Pierce on The American Prospect’s Web log, TAPPED.

“I watched [Seinfeld] long enough,” Mr. Pierce wrote, “to realize that there was an awful lot of overdog bullying going on at the heart of the phenomenon—vaguely racist and xenophobic, with a mysterious sweet-tooth for Funny Cripple humor. We’re losers, but the world is full of bigger losers, and a lot of them look different. Ho, ho …. [W]hat I saw [in Richards’ racist rage] was the unleashed Id of the authentic television landmark of which Richards was a part” (italics mine).

Well said, I thought, although still a bit of a stretch. It’s true there was the racial-verging-on-racist caricature of Johnnie Cochran. It’s not that you can’t caricature Johnnie Cochran, but this was written in a simpleminded and lame Amos ’n’ Andy way. (And as one of the TAPPED commenters added, there was the testimony of the Hispanic comedian Danny Hoch about being asked to be on Seinfeld and being told to make his accent more clownish and pejoratively stereotyped.)

Of course, it must be said that Michael Richards himself didn’t write the sneering-at-ethnics episodes. They were mostly the product of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David (who continues to practice this self-congratulatory, “daring” ridicule of ethnics ever so blithely and smugly on his own show). Mr. Pierce’s Kramer-the-unleashed-id-of-Seinfeld theory implies that Mr. Richards—a blameless naif, like Kramer—somehow absorbed or internalized the self-satisfied culture of contempt for ethnics that pervaded the show’s writing. And that it was just a slippery slope to the racist outburst at the Laugh Factory.

This would really entail ….

Theory No. 1/Subpart A: Blame Jerry and Larry David. This has a certain appeal to me (since I keep hearing back that Mr. David has a thin skin when reacting to my critiques of his “genius”). But in a way, this Subpart A theory robs Mr. Richards of personal moral responsibility for his hate speech. Makes him a mere puppet, a mouthpiece for the dark side of Seinfeldian culture.

By the way, before we leave Theory No. 1 and No. 1/Subpart A, there was an ironic twist to the reaction to Mr. Pierce’s post that raised provocative questions about the cultural reception of certain kinds of comedy. It had to do with the way Mr. Pierce framed his attack on Seinfeld.

He explained his loathing of the program in cultural/historical terms by saying: “Back when the late Sam Kinison was prowling the stages and scaring people … it was Jerry whom the culture warriors brought out to soothe their maidenly vapors,” by making safe jokes about cereal and the like.

While I might take issue with this vision of some Secret Council of Cultural Hegemonists determining what people will be directed to find funny, the attack on Mr. Pierce came from another direction. He was called out by two women on the Prospect blog (Garance Franke-Ruta and Adele M. Stan) as an example of misogyny on the left—because he used the term “maidenly vapors,” and because he seemed to praise Sam Kinison. (They say comedy is dangerous, but commenting on comedy is really dangerous.)

The case for this critique of Mr. Pierce’s comments seemed to rest on two assumptions: that Kinison’s comedy was misogynist rather than being about misogyny, even a critique of misogyny. (Kinison’s raving, drooling, unhinged fat-slob persona was not the most attractive role model.) The other assumption is that whether or not misogyny was promoted or critiqued in Kinison’s act, Mr. Pierce must somehow be a misogynist himself for laughing at it, or for implicitly praising Kinison by calling him scary and dangerous compared to the “maidenly” Seinfeld.

Personally, I find it hard to believe that Mr. Pierce was praising Kinison because he enjoyed the misogyny rather than, say, ruefully enjoying the ridicule of misogyny.

There’s a case for viewing Kinison’s comedy as critique: Does anyone believe he really wanted to “kill the homeless”? Indeed, one could view Kinison through the same lens that the feminist artist Barbara Kruger viewed Howard Stern: Like it or not, here’s someone telling (at least part of) the ugly truth about men.

I’d concede there were people—butt-head frat-boy types—who laughed at Kinison for the “wrong” reasons. But must one police an artist for the responses of some of his fans? Does one avoid comedy like this because there’s a risk that someone can laugh at it for the wrong reasons? Still, one can’t deny that those people criticizing Kinison may have genuinely felt hurt by the idea that some people found him funny, and feelings are facts, as they say. So there’s no easy answer, but Mr. Pierce had touched off an interesting and, I’d argue, important debate.

Still, I think the comparison of Michael Richards to Sam Kinison is unfair to Kinison, although that’s what …

Theory No. 2 involves: basically, that Mr. Richards was being (or attempting to be) Sam Kinison, but that, essentially, he botched the joke. This theory would have us believe that Mr. Richards was playing on and exposing racism rather than practicing it. I find this to be a dicey, often disingenuous excuse (see my chapter on The Merchant of Venice in The Shakespeare Wars, in which I discuss the contention that the play is not anti-Semitic but rather “about anti-Semitism”).

It’s just not going to work for Mr. Richards (who tried to claim on Letterman that he was doing some sort of jujitsu with the N-word). Not after you’ve seen the YouTube clip of his Laugh Factory meltdown, with the rancid racial hostility that sure doesn’t look like “shtick,” that doesn’t seem like something being parodied but rather enacted with deadly seriousness.

But what about Theory No. 3, the David Letterman Thesis: “Blame Borat.” In his monologue on the night that he had Jerry Seinfeld on and Mr. Seinfeld arranged for Mr. Richards to make his pale, ghostly, satellite-beamed-apology appearance, Mr. Letterman cracked: “I blame it on Borat.”

I think what he was getting at was that Borat, the movie, had somehow created a permissive climate for the expression of all kind of slurs, racial, religious and sexual, that are somehow taken as good-natured send-ups of slurs, thus legitimizing their use, and that Mr. Richards’ outburst was an expression of this presumably unhealthy climate. (“I blame it on Borat.”) Either that or Mr. Letterman was making fun of that whole rather prudish fear-of-Borat mindset. Or both. Hard to tell when Dave is at his ambiguous best.

There may be something to the permissive-climate argument, although I think Sacha Baron Cohen clearly seeks to make bigots look bad—or at least incredibly stupid—with his persona, while Mr. Richards’ outburst seemed to come straight from the heart, with no “persona” involved—it was really, simply who he was. Unless you want to believe …

Theory No. 4: Self-Borating. The premise of what might be called “Borating” is that the comedian/ trickster finds a way to reveal the ugly, racist or sexist sentiments that lurk beneath the benign surface of ordinary, otherwise nice-seeming folk. Self-Borating would be a way of provoking the exposure, consciously or inadvertently, of the ugly truth about oneself.

What Mr. Richards was saying in his initial post-outburst statements—remarks about how shocking it is to find this within and how “it fires out of me” and “the way this came through me was like a freight train”—was that he had done to himself what Borat had done, say, to the compliant Arizona bar folk he got to sing “Throw the Jew Down the Well.” They weren’t anti-Semites on the surface, but scratch that surface and something they were unaware lurked within them emerges. Self-Borating means that Mr. Richards was scratching his own surface. Borating himself out. Still a kind of evasion of his own responsibility.

I don’t buy it. But I do think there’s a metaphorical variation on it that might say something true about the incident. That would be …

Theory No. 5: Blame Jerry’s Unlocked Door. This was something my friend Stanley Mieses brought up in a phone conversation: “If only Jerry hadn’t kept his door unlocked,” Stanley said. He was referring to Mr. Richards’ signature shtick on Seinfeld: Kramer bursting unannounced through Jerry’s unlocked apartment door.

That is, Stanley explained, Kramer wouldn’t have been Kramer—and Mr. Richards wouldn’t have been the kind of big-shot star who thinks he’s above heckling at a comedy club—if it hadn’t been for that “bursting-through-Jerry’s-door shtick.”

For some reason, most of America decided to agree that Kramer’s door-bursting entrances were super-super-hilarious. Look, the funny man is bursting through the door again! I personally always cringed at these irritating entrances and Kramer’s supposedly wacky persona, but I was in a minority. Clearly, Mr. Richards’ entire existence, his life and fortune, was—up to the racist incident—defined by his allegedly hilarious bursting through an unlocked door.

And looked at metaphorically, Stanley’s theory suggests, what happened on the stage of that comedy club was racism bursting through an unlocked door. Unlocked doors are good, supposedly—betokening a lack of inhibition. Maybe that’s what Mr. Richards was doing—disinhibition—consciously or unconsciously: letting the rancid thoughts within burst through a door left unlocked.

But maybe unlocked doors aren’t always a good thing. Maybe there are some things that deserve to be inhibited by a lock. The lesson some have drawn from Mr. Richards’ rant is that we all have racist thoughts in some dank room that we keep under lock and key. I don’t necessarily agree, but I think it’s maybe a good idea to keep that door locked anyway.