Am I the only one to be mildly suspicious of Donna Brazile’s recent confession that she admires Clarence Thomas? In the American Spectator Online, she says that she considers Thomas to be a “role model for black Americans” just “like Jesse Jackson, Tiger Woods and Thurgood Marshall.” Yes, Marshall “had a different path” to the Supreme Court than his successor. But Brazile calls Thomas a “remarkable man with a great [life] story.” She says he is a modern-day “Booker T. Washington because he speaks to old -fashioned values.” “I admire him [Thomas] as a human being and thinker.” Forget the disconcerting equation of Jesse Jackson with Thurgood Marshall or the assertion that Tiger Woods is black when he has taken some pains to say he is post-racial. The Spectator’s Evan Gahr takes this nevertheless to be great news. It seems to me to be the first clear indication that Brazile has grander political ambitions. There are already rumors of her being interested in D.C. government. And one of her liabilities is that her extreme leftism could make her a target for rivals seeking a more moderate image in the mold of the current mayor, Anthony Williams. Brazile is a formidable political operative. No-one should take away from her her organizational skill in turning out the black vote for Gore in the last election. But no-one should also ignore the semi-racist rhetoric she used to do so; nor her weird ambiguity about her sexual orientation while being on the board of the Millennium March on Washington for gay rights and visibility. Her current positioning is of a piece with a shrewd political mind – and with naked political ambition.
WHIGS AND TORIES: At dinner this week with my old and close friend, the historian Niall Ferguson, I finally figured out what I think is going on in British politics. It’s all very eighteenth century. The parties don’t represent massive differences – ideological or otherwise. Faction and personality is everything. You’ve got the classic Whig, Blair, believing in modernization and reform, destroying the nation-state, merging with a new, undemocratic and anti-American Europe. You have his tiny faction, perched atop a large and largely unreconstructed Labour Party base, that still instinctively uses the word ‘obscene’ to append to the word ‘profit.’ (I heard a Labour MP use exactly that phrase this week on British television, when referring to British Petroleum’s recent successes.) You have the classic Tory, Hague, equally beset by a parliamentary party the bulk of which represents little but a lumpen-aristocracy with the chance of a slow renewal. Plots are everywhere – I was surprised to hear and see the fragility of Blair’s coalition; but the factionalism stretches across British politics – and could wound Hague himself if he does very poorly in the coming election. You have the same fund-raising scandals that you have in Clinton’s Washington. And it’s all lively stuff, carried by a shamelessly partisan press, warring with each other as much as with the politicians, in a bawdy and rambunctious city that seems more alive than I can remember in my lifetime. Coming from Washington, it reminds me of the great lack in America of a single political, commercial and artistic capital in the United States. Sometimes in New York, of course. But never in the city to which I’ll return tomorrow. See you state-side.
TEDIUM.COM: Yes, the New Yorker has joined the digital age! I mention this a week or so after the fact merely to affect the same above-it-all ennui that, post-Tina, has quietly crept back into that gorgeous font. I also mention it since I’ve just read – in this endless trans-Atlantic flight – one of the best little pieces about the magazine since Michael Kinsley’s so many years back. David Pryce-Jones gets it pricelessly right in the current Spectator (of London) which is also (mainly) online. Don’t know several thousand feet up in the air whether this review is clickable, but if not, here are some gems. It’s a review of the latest New Yorker collection, devoted to those profiles which pile fact upon fact and anecdote upon anecdote until you know the precise color of some obscure person’s toe hair. Within the review is the best description I have yet read of what it is actually like – most of the time – to try and read the magazine: “Reading these profiles in their original magazine form, in self-preservation your eye will skip a couple of columns only to find that the writer is still struggling up to the waist in a bog of detail. Another skip or two, and you turn to the unfailingly amusing cartoons set into the text, and then you replace the magazine on the coffee table where it belongs as an accessory. An anthology offers no such escape. You suffer that loss of spirit which comes when some stranger at a gathering holds your arm to encumber you with a story which has no apparent point or ending.” For some reason, even writers who usually cannot write a boring sentence, like Ken Tynan or Malcolm Gladwell, have a job wading through to your consciousness in such environs. Tynan was reduced to observing that Mrs. Johnny Carson had “a quill-shaped Renaissance nose,” which sounds painful. Not as half as painful as reading about it.
ANTI-ZIONISM IN EUROPE: It’s alive and well and firmly entrenched. In London, you’ve only got to pick up the Economist, with its visceral disdain for Israel, to get a sense of the atmosphere. In some ways, though, it’s refreshing. In the United States, most opposition to Israeli defense actions, or diplomatic initiatives, or military strikes, is veiled through an anti-anti-Arabism that never quite gets to the point. Not so in the British press. In London, the left is particularly touchy. Barely any of Tony Blair’s back-benchers supported the strikes on Iraq, and papers like the Guardian can be relied upon to lambaste the Jewish state on a regular basis. Barbara Amiel points out in the Daily Telegraph today the tenor of some of the coverage. The Independent recently bold-faced a description of Ariel Sharon as a man whose “name is synonymous with butchery; with bloated corpses and disemboweled women and dead babies, with rape and pillage and murder.” Nice touch – the “dead babies.” The Guardian‘s Middle East correspondent, Damien Hirst, moonlights for the viciously anti-Zionist Lebanese Daily Star, where he opines that every inch of Israel is “usurped land” and a “colonialist enterprise.” The Observer – the major liberal Sunday paper – ran a poem yesterday by a poet who referred to “the Zionist SS.” Subtle, innit? But disturbing, nonetheless, that liberal Zionism seems pretty dormant in England, propped up by some Tories and Blairites atop a highly unfriendly carapace. My buddy William Hague is the genuine article. But I also hope George W. realizes the political risks Tony Blair takes in supporting strong military action against Iraq. On this one, I tip my borrowed yarmulke to the guy.
THE WAR ON ‘DRUGS’: My aversion to anti-drug laws only deepened this week when Tony “I’ll-Try-Anything” Blair announced that one of his major initiatives for the next parliament will be yet another ‘crack-down’ on drugs. These crack-downs happen every couple of years, of course, proving, again, that reconstructed left-wing parties – Clinton’s and Blair’s in particular – have some of the worst civil liberties records around. But the real problem is the definition of the word ‘drug.’ As technology advances, it’s becoming harder and harder to distinguish between what might be called recreational a
nd medicinal substances. Marijuana is the obvious candidate here – and has literally helped save the lives of thousands of cancer and AIDS patients. But now, there’s evidence that even the designer drug Ecstasy might have medicinal qualities. A forthcoming BBC documentary on Parkinson’s Disease discovered by complete chance that a Parkinson’s sufferer found temporary relief from his symptoms while ‘rolling’ in London’s club-scene. The man went to the clubs because they were one of the few places where his occasional uncontrollable jerking went unnoticed in the strobe lights and general mayhem. He felt less self-conscious and more alive. Then someone offered him some ‘e’ and – lo and behold – he found himself also able to move more smoothly, dance more easily, and regain flexibility. Now, scientists are beginning to replicate this and analyze the chemical structure of Ecstasy to see what possible medical benefits might be gained for people with Parkinson’s. I’m not saying there’s no societal interest in regulating some drugs – especially those that are highly chemically addictive or that lead to anti-social behavior. But some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs have come from accidents and experimentation and where chemicals are not demonstrably destructive or dangerous, I see no reason why people shouldn’t try them and see what happens. The greatest field of experimental behavior is that recovered from mass experience. Random discoveries are simply more likely the more people there are in the sample. So let’s have less of a war on drugs and more of a war on anti-social behavior. We might save or improve countless lives while we’re at it.
The Dish 