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Volume CCXXXVI, Number 144 October 14, 2006 

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It's hard to believe that this represents Amy's first appearance on the unreadable list, but she's more than earned her spot with her attempt to mine an old non-fiction vein: sensitive soul comes to L.A. from someplace civilized (preferably New York) and finds it . . . weird.

As the title suggests, there are earthquakes in California. L.A. is a great big freeway. The sun is bright. The locals are beautiful but so superficial they don't even care who had a piece published in the New Yorker and who has a chair at Columbia. Have we left out any clichés? You can bet Amy won't.

Not even the one about how in California washed-up movie stars reinvent themselves as politicians. We hold no brief for Austria's gift to American democracy but is he really any more improbable a governor than George Pataki?

Amy, according to the reviews, confesses to a bit of a crush on Arnold, but doesn't know why. We'll help her out: he's related to the Kennedys, he treats women like crap and he's famous. No wonder Amy can't get him out of her mind. Of course, maybe that's also why Amy feels all those earthquakes.

It's not just Jews like Amy Wilentz who can write unreadable books – Jew haters like Rashid Khalidi can, too (and they can get tenure at Columbia out of it!).  In his blatantly dishonest screed, Khalidi purports to "explain" one of history's least complicated questions: why the Palestinians do not have a state.

We'll bet that Professor Khalidi will be invoking the full verbal arsenal of continental gasbags: historiography as power relations, intertextual valorization of ideology and other such crap. Sounds good when you're surrounded by the toadies of your "Middle Eastern Studies" Department in your twelve-room apartment on Riverside Drive, but not so impressive to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with reality. Even George Bush has figured this one out.

Of course, the Palestinians could have had the state carved out for them by the United Nations in 1947 or the one that Ehud Barak was willing to give to Yassir Arafat in 2000, but they turned both offers down. Why? Because they'd have to accept the reality of the State of Israel and permanently abandon their cherished plans to kill the Jews, or at least drive them into the sea. And that's why they don't have a state today and won't have one next year or the year after.

Talk about history as a subjective narration: how many index entries do you think Khalidi has for "anti-Semitism," "Israel's right to exist – Palestinian rejection of," or "Israeli civilians, Palestinian terror attacks on?" If you think the answer is greater than zero, don't hold your breath waiting for a tenured position on Morningside Heights.

Who would have guessed that the scion of a well-connected family of Texas plutocrats would find fame and fortune enabling the political careers of rich reactionary nitwits, mostly from Texas? Everyone, probably, which is why it's hard to know why anyone would plunk down real money for the self-serving prevarications of the GOP's Mr. Fixit.

America tends to forget its history as quickly as last year's Super Bowl winner, but we have a dim recollection of old Jimmy doing his level best, aided by several regiments of Republican lawyers, hatchet-men and apologists, to make sure that the ballots in Florida were not honestly counted back in 2000, because a full recount might not have delivered the 2000 election to the anointed savior of America's moneyed class, known at the time as Shrub.

We remember the old reptile's jowls quivering in mock indignation over the prospect of a full and fair recount and his eyes narrowing in contempt for the $50,000-a-year reporters who dared to challenge his fictive version of electoral events.

One reviewer said that Baker was able to survive a career in politics with his reputation for integrity intact. We suppose that's true in the sense that Paris Hilton's reputation for chastity remains intact, at zero.