If you're sober by noon...

a Line in the Sand in today's NYT is worth reading. Not a simple take, but not so complex it bears skipping.

At the center of this debate is Eyal Weizman, a 35-year-old Israeli architect and activist who has been a controversial figure in his homeland since 2002, when he published a report for a local human rights organization that essentially accused Israeli architects of being collaborators in the colonization of the West Bank.

Building is never a neutral act, of course, and Mr. Weizman makes no distinctions between the realms of architecture and politics. For decades, he has often noted, Israeli architects made much of their livelihood designing settlements in the occupied territories. Many felt their job was to solve problems - to make spaces functional, more humane, more aesthetically pleasing. But in doing so, Mr. Weizman argues, they also made the unacceptable seem tolerable, lending an oppressive policy a veneer of good taste.

The article concludes with this, a death knell for moderate postitions:

If some of the new cities of Israel reflect the successes of Modernism, the barrier represents the worst aspects of it - the rationalist tendency to reduce the world to a system of abstract relationships, a faith in tabula rasa planning, a distrust of urban chaos - without its idealism.

The consequences extend beyond the ghettoization of Palestinians and Israelis. The wall destroys the space for those who once occupied the middle ground: those who refuse to divide the world into good and bad, civilization and barbarity. It threatens to sever the threads, already fragile, that might one day be woven into a more tolerant image of coexistence.

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If that's too complex for your head to follow this fine morning, try this opinion piece from Mr. Larry David. Larry comes to realize the only thing he has to fear, is himself. So he stays away. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

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Finally, Harold Bloom recounts the contribution of Limbo to literature, and remembers his friend, the great Anthony Burgess.

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So there you go. Nothing simple really, but then what worth fully knowing ever is? Myself? I'm holding off on proclaiming the new year, until we see if it's really just more of the same, in fresh packaging. George McEvoy too finds blind optimism hard to come by this year.