I recently finished Salman Rushdie’s new book Knife. As improbable as it seems for a book subtitled Meditations After an Attempted Murder, it is a love story. It is the story of love for his wife Eliza but also the story of love for democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and just fucking freedom – things that were generally accepted American values before the Republican party surrendered to the MAGA cult.

It is an intimate story, at times almost overwhelmingly. In a good way. His digressions into the workings of an author’s mind are fascinating, as in his description of his thought process on the night before the attack:

I also remembered Georges Melies’s fourteen-minute silent film Le Voyage dans la Lune, the early-cinema classic from 1902 about the first men to reach the moon, traveling in a bullet-shaped capsule fired from an immensely long cannon, wearing top hats and frock coats, and carrying umbrellas. This is the most famous moment from that film – the moon landing:

I had no idea, as I remembered the image of the spaceship wounding the moon’s right eye, of what the next morning had in store for my own right eye.

In the middle of the trauma and recovery, Rushdie suffered the loss of his dear friend Martin Amis and saw others around him dealing with cancer and heart disease. Rather than give in to despair, he found a deep well of joy and healing in the love that surrounded him.

On Valentine’s Day In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini – a prominent asshole of the highest degree – issued a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie and those who published his book The Satanic Verses. Hitoshi Igarashi, the book’s Japanese translator, was stabbed to death. Four months after issuing the fatwa, Khomeini himself died after suffering five heart attacks in ten days. Karma’s a bitch, asshole.

Around that time, I wrote a song called Salman Rushdie about the genius and the asshole.  Here is my recording of it:

I’ve got a price on my head
All those Muslims wish I was dead
Because I wrote a book

I wrote a story
Just to say what’s on my mind
Now I’m gonna die
Because I wrote a book

I don’t blame Mohammed
For the people in Iran
Like I don’t blame Jesus 
For the Ku Klux Klan

But these men will kill you
They’ll strangle your mind
These men will kill me
Because I’m not their kind

Because I wrote a book