Month: April 2001

A reader points out the odd opening sentence of Barbra Streisand’s memo to the Democratic leadership. It says: “This is a key moment in our history. We cannot let the right wing roll back thirty years of social progress.” Thirty years, huh? So social progress began in 1971 under Richard Nixon, that great old liberal. And of those thirty years, eighteen were under Republican presidents. Maybe the impending catastrophe won’t be so terrible after all.

Dan Rather was the guest speaker at a Democratic Party fundraiser. And Sam Donaldson wears a toupee and Peter Jennings is a Canadian. Who knew? The only hilarious part of this is that CBS still thinks we might be surprised.

What does the USATodayMiamiHeraldKnightRidder ballot review tell us? Nothing we didn’t already know. We always knew that the margin of victory in Florida was smaller than the margin of error. That’s why the only rational, sane, fair thing to do was to accept the result of the mandatory machine recount and let it go. That’s also why Gore’s attempt to upend that recount in order to finagle a way to a technical victory was so outrageous. He knew there was no possibility of finality here. But his Clintonian win-at-all-costs mentality led him to believe that if he could rig the re-re-recount and finesse the public relations, he still had a chance. When that failed, he could always sit back and preen that he was robbed, stolen, etc. The only good news from this is that it means that Gore will never be able to say that again with any credibility. Nor will Barbra Streisand. Nor will all the other partisans who still insist their election was “stolen.” They will now, of course, rest their hopes on another media recount of “over-votes.” If that fails, they’ll try something else. Gore and his acolytes still cannot acknowledge that, according to the rules of the game, they lost. Period. Their dragging of the country through weeks of turmoil and constitutional crisis was an act of extraordinary hubris and recklessness – in my view, the final, lawless act of eight lawless years. It’s over now, and this is a deeply satisfying exclamation point. The current president is now and has been since November 7 the only legitimate 43rd president of the United States. Get over it.

THE MEANING OF REFORM: There are plenty of people now second-guessing McCain-Feingold. It sure isn’t perfect. The restrictions on independent advertising sixty days before an election is so clearly unconstitutional we can only hope the Supreme Court will knock it down soon. And the money will find a way, of course, to express itself. But the true meaning of reform isn’t and never has been the ‘solution’ of some sort of ‘problem.’ It’s a process of tinkering, correcting, adjusting. All in all, I think this reform makes our system a little less susceptible to moneyed interests than before – and that’s all to the good. The best reforms can only ever achieve that much – and they will need replacement in time. I’m reminded of the paradoxes of this process by a new and superb translation of Constantine Cavafy‘s poetry, which I’ve been devouring in bed getting over a stomach bug. Cavafy, for those who haven’t heard of him, is probably one of the great modern poets – up there with Auden and Eliot and Larkin, in my opinion. In one of his poems, “The Windows,” he shows — damnit: here’s the full poem:

“In these dark rooms, where I go
Through weary days, I wander back and forth,
Looking for the windows. – When it opens,
A window will be consolation. –
But the windows aren’t there to be found, or I’m unable
To find them. And perhaps it’s better for me not to find them.
Perhaps the light will be some novel tyranny.
Who knows what new things it will show.”

Here’s hoping McCain-Feingold isn’t some novel tyranny after all.

So the media media mag Brill’s Content has now merged with the media media mag, Inside.com. You can read all about it on the media media media site, MediaNews. Or here at andrewsullivan.com, a media site devoted in part to reading media sites about media sites. I think they should scrap the rather corporate moniker, Brill’s Inside Content, though. Why not just call it “Navel?” Somehow I think we’ll get the reference.

Readers will know I’m no global warming Pollyanna. Nevertheless, I think Bush has gotten a bum rap over his decision on Kyoto. The decision had already been made for him. For why, check out “Bush and Hot Air,” posted opposite.

In his otherwise diverting column on sex with animals (how’s that for an opener?), I think Tim Noah thinks the singular of homo sapiens is homo sapien. Or maybe it’s a typo. Speaking of bestiality, I recall a story told me by my friend, Dan Savage, who writes a spectacularly good sex advice column called “Savage Love.” He was doing a radio call-in when a man phoned to say he believed that his relationship with a horse was fully consensual. The horse, the man explained, could easily kick him out of the way while he was expressing his deep and abiding love for the beast. The fact that the horse didn’t should be taken as a signal of consent, he insisted. Temporarily stymied, Dan asked, “Is this horse a male or a female?” “A female!” the man replied. “What do you think I am – a pervert?”

I’m always recommending reading and you’ve got far better things to do, but, if you have a few minutes, have a look at a truly splendid piece in the current issue of Reason magazine on the prescription drug industry. Better than anything I’ve yet read, it’s a devastating rebuttal of most of the attacks on Big Pharma these last few years. Compared to John Le Carre’s sub-literate screed in the current Nation, it’s a cornucopia of lucid information and analysis. It also destroys the American Prospect’s embarrassingly dumb recent attack on the drug industry, “The Price Isn’t Right.” My favorite points: the Columbia economist Frank Lichtenberg’s studies of how pharmaceutical innovation has cost our society far less than it has saved in increased longevity, leisure, health and reductions in hospitalization. To my mind, this issue is now the front-line of our new ideological divide. Who wins matters – not least for the health, happiness and productivity of the next generation of Americans.

ARSENIC AGAIN: Interesting letter from Christie Todd Whitman in the Washington Post today. She points out that the last-minute Clinton regulations on reducing arsenic levels in water weren’t due to be in place till 2006. This means either a) the Bushies have exaggerated the economic cost in getting to this level or b) there’s no harm in having a second look before we enforce them. Either way, it’s a little hard to interpret this as W deliberately poisoning our drinking water at the behest of corporate America.

Just after Holland comes Belgium. Reuters reports today that the Belgian government intends to introduce legislation very shortly to legalize equal marriage rights for homosexuals. The Health minister gave her reasons: “The government considers the right to marry a constitutional right, and the chance to marry the sole true opportunity to see that homosexual and heterosexual couples are treated in the same way.” Couldn’t have put it better myself. The prime minister of this 75 percent Roman Catholic country has said, “There are no objections on principle for the moment.” This news comes on the heels of Holland’s legalization of equal marriage rights on Sunday and a Gill Foundation study that asked over 1000 gay men and lesbian what their primary objective was in political change. 32 percent said equal marriage rights – more than for any other issue. Those who once argued that we should leave this issue alone, that it would never win, that its time had not come, are slowly being proved wrong. Far from being defensive about this, I think gay leaders should be even more aggressive. We should move bills in every state we can – not simply to deflect attacks on equal marriage rights, but to legalize marriage for all citizens equally. Paul Varnell wrote an excellent column recently on these lines. Check it out.

SAVE THE COWS: A definitive piece in New Scientist rebuts the notion that mass slaughter is the best way to restrain foot-and-mouth disease. In fact, these tactics are primarily a way to protect EU agriculture from Eastern bloc products. Tony Blair has now put off elections to cope with the crisis – and its fallout. Could cows save the Tories? Stranger things have happened.

“We have a President who stole the presidency through family ties, arrogance and intimidation, employing Republican operatives to exercise the tactics of voter fraud by disenfranchising thousands of blacks, elderly Jews and other minorities.” – Barbra Streisand, in an urgent 3-page <a HREF = http://www.drudgereport.com/babs.htm TARGET = NEW>memo to Democratic leaders, leaked to the Drudge Report.

“With the guidance of his regents, the Duke of Halliburton and Cardinal Rumsfeld, W. has set off the specter of a mushroom cloud of carcinogens and carbon dioxide emissions, nuclear power and “China Syndrome” fears, rapacious drilling and retrenchment on women’s rights, the missile shield, spy tensions and the cold war.” – Maureen Dowd, The <a HREF = http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/opinion/01DOWD.html TARGET = NEW>New York Times.

Memo to Maureen: on arsenic and carbon dioxide, Bush has proposed keeping the same regimes that prevailed throughout the entire Clinton administration; he has acknowledged that drilling in the Arctic Reserve almost certainly won’t happen; more nuclear power is actually a way to help alleviate global warming, not exacerbate it; he supports a missile shield that Clinton also (more coolly) supported; the expulsion of Russian spies was in the works for months before he took office. Oh and: what retrenchment of “women’s rights”? Overseas abortion aid? Did I blink and miss something?

There are just a few nascent buds of blossom on the cherry trees, and the hyacinths are slowly unwrapping in the window boxes. In the dank afternoon air, all that interrupts the chirping of birdsong outside my apartment window is the familiar pop-popping of gunfire, the shattering of car windscreens, and a swoop of sirens. Two guys running down my block apparently opened fire, taking in a few parked cars. Could be worse, I suppose. No-one was killed. And the cops actually caught the guy using the gun. This latter event, previously unknown in Washington, may signal some kind of increasing role for our police force in combating something they have recently begun to identify as “crime.” But don’t count on it.

MALE-FREE ZONE: A reader sends in a fascinating email about self-defense classes from which men are barred. It’s the kind of email I would really like to include in a letters page – which, thanks to your donations, will be up and running within a month. Anyway, here it is: “I took one of those self-defense classes in college. The real reason they don’t want men attending is that it is half therapy session. You have to get very aggressive to be effective. They have you scream very loud, visualize male attackers, fight the instructor, etc. It can do weird things to you psychologically – hit areas you never knew existed. “Hey, you know it occurs to me that I’m pretty pissed off that I have to deal with this at all – and that I’ve lived my whole life under this threat. F— men.” A lot of women seize up anyway because it literally goes against every fiber of their being to do anything that aggressive or to hurt someone. It would presumably be worse with guys there. It’s not just the p.c. faction and reverse discrimination. It’s amazing how well this feminist warrior mentality fits in with the views of the police who teach these courses. “Everyone is a potential criminal.” After the course, I walked around paranoid for months and then it wore off.” Good point, I think. But I’m not entirely convinced. For example, it’s not necessary to fear that every man will rape you to get your head wrapped around self-defense. A couple of sympathetic men – maybe gay men! – might help defuse the androphobia. And imagine for a minute if they had such classes in inner cities and encouraged the participants, black and white, to assume that every black man was a potential mugger or rapist – and excluded black men from the course. I doubt that would pass the sniff test – rightly so. So why is it ok to generalize about one group and not another?