A guest post from Marty Peretz

So our new president has tapped George Mitchell as Middle East envoy. The president is a good man. Mitchell too. But do either of them really believe this will amount to anything?

We are, after all, talking about Arabs. Fools. Does any of them even know the joys of a ham sandwich?

Look at this picture.

Do you see? Not an Arab among them. And some people laughed at Ringo. But Ringo always knew more than he let on. After all, where is John — “the smart one” — today? Underground, felled by the bullets of an assassin with pitiful taste in 20th century American novels, while that she-beast he married continues to whore out his good name on tasteless merchandising.

It was, in any case, in these very pages that an early version of “Please Please Me” first appeared under the title “Eichmann; the System; the Victims” by Bruno Bettelheim.

In fact it was just last week that I attended a small gathering at one of Manhattan’s most elite restaurants to discuss this very topic. Actually, it was the Cheesecake Factory, but all of us were preferred members. Music was provided by the Alban Berg quartet via portable iPod speakers. Opining on the conflict were myself, Martin Kramer, myself again, and the shade of Theodore Herzl returned from the dead.

Later it turns out that it was not in fact Theodore Herzl but a vagabond come in for shelter, who, lacking the necessary accoutrement, had been unable to properly groom in some time, thus bearing an uncanny resemblance to Herzl. Nevertheless, in the quarter of an hour in which he held forth, he revealed more wisdom than all the Middle East envoys put together.

In any event, we shall see.

(Next week’s guest post: Leon Wieseltier on watching an episode of Def Poetry Slam that he inadvertently Tivo’d last year.)