I loathe airplanes but they do give me reading time. A couple of recommendations. Christopher Hitchens sparkles in the new Vanity Fair, with a screed against the anti-smoking commissars. Hitch is an old lefty, but his knee jerks in the right direction when it comes to civil liberties and what he calls “p.c. creeps.” (He was also of course bravely dead-on when it came to Clinton). Hitch rightly points out that smoking isn’t merely a health hazard or a dirty habit – it is also a part of a certain kind of culture. The kind of bar Hitch likes to get toasted in is not smoke-free; nor is any decent jazz lounge; nor, in the old days, was a back-room at a political convention. Several members of my family smoked and I hated it as a child. But the smoky haze in the kitchen as several Irish-English relatives yelled at one another over some minor political issue nevertheless provided great production values for my youth. Yes, yes, I know second-hand smoke is supposed to be harmful (although I don’t believe it for a second). And I don’t believe in smoking in someone else’s face without asking first. This is called manners. But equally, as Hitch puts it, “Don’t pursue me to the park bench if you prevent me from smoking indoors; I will of course ask permission of anyone else sitting there. I will even ask permission to smoke from people who visit me in my own home. But I won’t let them visit me and then tell me to put my cigarette out. Anyone failing to see this distinction is a moral cretin.” Amen, brother. And I say this as someone who has never smoked a cigarette in his entire life. (Tobacco, anyway.)
PIN-STRIPED NAZIS: Equally, Ian Buruma (another friend) has a terrific little piece in the New Yorker about the trial of David Irving, the English historian and Holocaust “minimizer.” Ian attended the libel trial Irving brought against the American scholar Deborah Lipstadt in London and elegantly picks apart its very English subtext of class resentment. I think Buruma gets Irving perfectly and lands a couple of deft punches at some of his supporters. (He’s a little unfair on Hitch, though.) Buruma is alternately fascinated and repelled by a certain kind of English aristocratic reactionary, and is wise enough to see that this dark and evil strain in English culture nearly ceded the continent to Hitler in 1940. It’s also far from dead, as any perusal of the Daily Telegraph will reveal. But I had never quite put Irving in this context – as a member of what Orwell called the insecure “lower-upper-middle-class.” Ian also pointed out some amazing details from the trial that had somehow gone unreported until now: “At moments, … Irving made curious slips, as when he apparently referred to the judge as mein Fuhrer. (It should also be noted that the judge once or twice referred to Irving as Hitler.)” Could Monty Python have pulled that one off, I wonder?
DERBYSHIRE: Several readers have emailed to say that they couldn’t see anything racist or bigoted in John Derbyshire’s weird piece about Jews in National Review Online, noted earlier. Perhaps I needed to translate. Derbyshire’s favorite Jew from his childhood exclaimed that he loathed Proust because he was a “Chewish poof!” That means “Jewish faggot.” Derbyshire then wrote: “I have never since felt the slightest urge to read Proust.” To dismiss one of the greatest writers in Western civilization purely because he was a Jewish homosexual seems to me to be prima facie evidence of bigotry. If that isn’t, what is?
The Dish 