Peter Handke, perhaps the most preeminent and creative European playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist alive today, has recently been embroiled in a cultural scandal that involves character assassination (his) through ad hominem attacks and calumny, censorship by a faceless theatre bureaucrat, and the relentless abuse of the Parisian bien-pensants, those guard dogs of French palatial conformism. Like in America, getting out of the core political line in France leads to either being utterly ignored or, when famous, being dragged into the mud and punished for crime of lese-majesty. The confluence of intellectual cowardice, financial and strategic interests, and navel-gazing, backslapping...