Month: May 2001

Smart little piece by Vaughn Ververs, editor of the Hotline, Washington’s favorite addiction. He points out that John McCain’s interview in Rolling Stone, where McCain said he’d have accepted the vice-presidential nod if Bush had asked him, got barely any media buzz. (Ververs’ mention was the first I’d heard of it.) Not surprising, I’d say. With campaign finance reform apparently inevitable and the tax cut imminent, the Bush-McCain rivalry stories have little wind behind them. Then there’s the Republican maverick niche, which has now been adopted by the craggy Luftmensch Jeffords. For my part, I always felt that McCain was a party man, and not prone to Jeffords-like shenanigans. Look how he played along after he lost the nomination to Bush. And look how he hasn’t had a cow over the tax cut. (McCain likes tax-cuts. He’s a Republican.) There’s still the hideously named Patients’ Bill of Rights, which McCain could exploit. But my best bet is that McCain is biding his time for a while. Which to my mind is the smartest thing for him to do.

HAZE IN WASHINGTON: Bummer of a day. Woke up with a fever and a voice that sounded like a cross between Bob Dole and Diane Rehm. Turns out I have bronchitis. What to do but slump with the beagle and try and read the latest Philip Roth. I don’t know of any writer who does as well with sex. Somehow he manages to make it faintly unsavory and yet ennobling. It’s also so refreshing to read a man who writes so easily about his sexual attraction for women, especially young women, without any of the usual p.c. cant. Good practice for my interview with Penthouse tomorrow. (It’s on politics, mercifully.) The only problem is that if you’re actually sick, reading is hard. I knew I was desperate when I found myself watching the evening news for the first time in months. What dreck. The actual information you get from Rather-Jennings-Brokaw is somewhat less than a couple of pages of cliché-ridden type, filled with stock video images. What’s the point? Jennings was reduced to announcing that tomorrow they’ll have a special feature on gadgets for retirees. It’ll make a nice interlude between the ads for incontinence pads and Maalox. And they take themselves soooo seriously.

HOME NEWS: You may have noticed the link to C-SPAN’s RealPlayer video of my Stanford speech. So many of you asked for it that we just put it up. Good luck with the download. Sorry, there’s no transcript. I make it up as I go along. But most of the ideas are developed at length in Virtually Normal.

Finally forced by my inability to find any book I actually want, I tried to bring order to my bookshelves tonight. I’ve tried this from time to time – with always the same effect. I get asthma from all the dust and within about half an hour, I find an old book I’d forgotten I owned and start reading. This time, it was a collection of the poet Philip Larkin’s prose. I’ve always been a lover of Larkin’s painful, subtle and often hilarious poetry – but he’s also a brilliant raconteur and curmudgeon, much of which, it turns out, was for show. Anyway, I thought you’d all get a kick out of this interchange from the Paris Review. Larkin was famous for giving interviews to pretentious literary types and spending most of the time quietly making fun of them. Here’s a classic:

“You haven’t been to America, have you?
Oh, no, I’ve never been to America, nor to anywhere else for that matter… I suppose everyone has his own dream of America. A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: the rest is a desert full of bigots. That’s what I think I’d like: where if you help a girl trim a Christmas tree you’re regarded as engaged, and her brothers start oiling their shotguns if you don’t call on the minister. A version of pastoral.”

So in the great red-zone vs. blue-zone debate, I think we know where Larkin would stand. Now, back to the bookshelves – oh, never mind.

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE WATCH: Browsing through the Washington Times over my Number 3 Supersized tonight, I came across a Bill O’Reilly column arguing that the pedophile group NAMBLA should be made illegal even for disseminating its views that under-age boys are old enough to have consensual sex. The First Amendment be damned – these people are evil! On the next page, I read that Alabama’s attempt to reform its marriage laws so that fourteen-year-olds can no longer legally marry has failed because of a filibuster. Fourteen? So let’s get this straight. In some states, what Mary Eberstadt would call a frightening new tolerance of pedophilia has been around and fully legal for more than a century. And Eberstadt didn’t even mention it in her recent Weekly Standard article on “pedophilia chic”? And O’Reilly is apparently unaware of it as well. One wonders why the religious right isn’t campaigning against a law which essentially condones child-abuse. And then one realizes that when pedophilia is heterosexual and in Alabama, some on the religious right couldn’t give a damn.

BUTCH ENOUGH: So-so piece in the L.A. Times on new research into the origins of homosexuality. But one nugget interested me: according to some researchers, gay men might be gay because they were exposed to higher than normal levels of testosterone in the womb. By analyzing how men and women hear differently, researchers expected to find gay men somewhere in between female and male hearing patterns. What they found is that gay men have hyper-masculinized hearing patterns – more attuned to “male” sounds than most straight men. Similarly, according to another researcher, the wonderfully named Marc Breedlove, the length of most gay men’s fingers suggests that they were exposed to greater-than-normal levels of male hormones prenatally. Breedlove also cites less reliable studies that show that gay men may have slightly higher levels of testosterone than straights and bigger genitalia. Hmmmm. We’re at such an early stage of understanding these things scientifically that I’m leery of making a call here. But my own experience would lead me to think that what might be at fault here is the single notion of homosexuality. Maybe there are homosexualities. Maybe some are more effeminate than usual; maybe some are more masculine. Hence drag queens and leather bars, flaming nellies and masculine bodybuilders. The fact that one can be attracted to members of the same gender doesn’t mean you have to be feminine; it might even mean you’re more masculine. How else do you explain the Marines?

Caught your attention? Two new pieces posted today. One is a profile of William Hague, old friend and apparently doomed Tory leader; the other is about the trend toward “soft” stories in news magazines. I’m for both.

Terrific cartoon from Tom Tomorrow shows alarming evidence that some on the left are intelligent and even … funny. It’s about arsenic, and captures the idiocy of the Democrats’ p.r. war on the issue in the first hundred days. Check it out.

THE LEFT AND AIDS: More signs of intelligent life – this time from Anthony Lewis, the columnist who only recently blamed most of the AIDS crisis on greedy multinational pharmaceutical companies. It seems like he’s been doing some reading, lately. How else to explain the following sentence: “Giving up a legal battle in South Africa, the major international drug companies have agreed to make drugs available at very low prices. But there are still daunting obstacles to the use of those drugs on the scale needed, including the lack of adequate health infrastructures to administer complex dosages.” Thanks, Tony, for a belated recognition of reality. Now get to work pointing out how the South African government is still offically skeptical of the HIV and AIDS connection, and has no intention of distributing anti-HIV drugs of any kind. Is that Merck’s fault as well?

Gray Davis has finally found an answer to his own state’s energy crunch: hire some Clinton-Gore attack-dogs. Noticed how he’s been ratcheting up the rhetoric to divert blame from his own disastrous energy policies? John Fund explains how it’s only going to get worse now that Davis has hired Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani, Clinton-Gore hatchetmen. And we thought the tone was changing …

There has been a sharp decline in cases of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain – none reported lately – but the morally horrifying slaughter continues. At the peak of the epidemic, around 33,000 animals were being slaughtered daily. That figure has now increased to a daily kill-rate of 79,000. Slaughter on this scale has meant the predictable cruelties. Among the allegations of inhumanity, according to the Sunday Times, are: “Animals being buried alive after suffering hours of pain from bolts fired into their skulls. The slaughter of piglets and kids with soft-nosed dumdum bullets that explode on impact, shattering bone and shredding flesh. New-born piglets and calves being beaten to death with spades and iron staves.” Cheaper than vaccination apparently.

FIRST ARIANNA, NOW KRISTOL?: Frank Foer has a typically stimulating essay in the new New Republic. He limns Bill Kristol’s slide away from conservative orthodoxy toward what Kristol calls “national greatness conservatism.” Foer argues that Kristol’s flirtation with John McCain’s primary candidacy was not just another piece of political opportunism (remember Kristol’s momentary crush on Colin Powell?) but a recasting of the conservative movement. How would it be recast? Kristol’s conservatism would have fewer reservations about a sizable welfare state; it would run foreign policy on moral interventionist lines, rather than rely on classical conservative realism; it would increase its skepticism of corporate America; it would fill the empty public square of liberalism with a sinewy patriotism. Call it New Republic Republicanism. The money-quote of the piece is this from Kristol, whining about his somewhat cramped social life under the Bushies: “Why are conservatives so upset? It isn’t that we supported McCain; it’s that we haven’t apologized for supporting him. There’s something sick about a movement like that.” I’m not convinced that Frank is entirely right. Although Kristol’s urban neocon roots make for an uneasy alliance with the Bush-Cheney axis, there’s plenty of time for Kristol to tack rightward again if the opportunity arises. He’s no Arianna. In fact, I’d put his chances of ending up an Independent or a Democrat as the same as John McCain’s, i.e. close to zero. It would be far more interesting if either broke ranks for good, but both must remember Pat Buchanan. Or the Republican aftermath of Teddy Roosevelt for that matter.

TESTOSTERONE STRIKES AGAIN: You know the pomo left line that there are no real psychological or biological differences between men and women? Since I got mauled by the usual suspects when I posited the bleeding obvious about testosterone in the New York Times Magazine last year, I’ve kept my eyes peeled on the subject. Interesting new study along these lines on pilot error from Johns Hopkins University. Comparing plane crashes between 1983 and 1997 in the U.S., and analyzing the types of error responsible, researchers found that men are more likely to screw up “because they run out of fuel, take risks with the weather and faulty aircraft, or forget to lower their landing gear. Women on the other hand are more likely to mishandle the controls or stall during take-off or landing.” According to the Daily Telegraph, male mistakes were far more likely to be related to risk-taking, flying planes with known problems, or misjudging the weather. Women were more cautious. The study included 144 women pilots and 287 men. Like most of these studies on nature-nurture, this one doesn’t prove anything. But like so many other studies on these lines, it’s mighty suggestive.

ANOTHER LEFTY DROPS THE “BUSH-IS-DUMB” LINE: “The left got rolled for years by Ronald Reagan’s dumb act, and I fear “W” is no dummy either – appearances, quite obviously, to the contrary.” – Eric Alterman, The Nation. Who says they never learn?

GAYS FOR BUSH’S TAX CUTS: Interesting data from Frank Luntz in a poll for the Center for the Study of Taxation. 82 percent of gay voters want to see the estate tax repealed; 72 percent called it discriminatory. That follows up on a Gill Foundation study that found earlier this year that gays and lesbians put taxes on the same level as same-sex unions as their highest priority issue – higher than the “civil rights” agenda favored by many gay rights organizations. Memo to Rove: if you blow this opportunity to make an historic bridge to gays and lesbians, you’ve only got yourself to blame. (Of course, it also means that once again, I’m out of step with my fellow homos. Sorry, guys.)

Why do the Feds ban marijuana but keep its active ingredient, THC, legal in pill form? Because they want to ban enjoyment, that’s why. Check out TRB opposite.

HOME NEWS: We should have a RealVideo tape of my Stanford speech posted today. It’ll be a link to the C-SPAN site, posted underneath the articles on the right. To all of you who asked where they could find a copy or download one, this is one option. Thanks too for Tipping Jar contributions. We just went past 500 individual contributions – over $12,000. You’ll see the results soon – promise. Plus: another jump in traffic. We’re on course for 175,000 unique visitors this month – up from 80,000 in January. Thanks – and spread the word.

Went to see the premiere of the new Anne Frank mini-series at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. How do you admit you got bored by a story so morally significant? The film lasted three and a half hours, which was about two longer than I could really deal with. It wasn’t bad as such. With actors like Ben Kingsley and Brenda Blethyn doing their best to breathe life into two-dimensional roles, it had its diversions. But the rest of the time it was like a cross between Billy Elliott and Schindler’s List. It was too cutesy to be moving; and too serious to be entertaining. I’m beginning to come around to the idea that the Holocaust is probably unrepresentable. The reason Anne Frank’s diary is so unforgettable is that it isn’t a representation – it’s real. Perhaps we need popular renditions of the Holocaust to keep it alive in the minds of more people than can visit a Holocaust Museum. At the same time, I can’t help feeling that some of this pop-production cannot help but diminish the ineffable evil of the Final Solution. Even with this subject, less is sometimes more.

SCHOOL CHOICE II: Some readers have reminded me that public high schools are obliged to give equal access to different groups, and that denial of any one group’s request to use school property or funds is a punishment for that group’s First Amendment rights to self-expression. Hmmm. Is it really true that a school board could have no discretion in allowing many groups but saying no to, say, a youth chapter of the Ku Klux Klan? No, I’m not saying the Scouts are the equivalent of the Klan, but the Scouts do sadly practice discrimination against some members for simply being honest about their sexual orientation. And lets not get into the Scout-master issue here. What about the Scouts themselves? Would a group that banned black kids from being in their organization have a right to equal access to school property? I doubt it. Sorry, guys, but this is the fall-out of a perfectly Constitutional decision by the Scouts to impose discrimination on kids. It’s a crying shame, but when all is said and done, they asked for it.

“Stop nodding your fat head – sit down and shut up!” These were Christopher Hitchens’ words to Philip Nobile, a lefty journalist who hijacked Hitch’s Barnes and Noble book-reading for a rant about Vanity Fair’s lack of affirmative action. You gotta love Hitch. He smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and is one of the last remnants of a culture that knows how to fight back against cant. Now that John Prescott has decked a protestor and Hitch has called one a fat-ass, is the tide turning against loopy protesters?

NOW THEY TELL US: The South Africa health minister announced this week that her government has no intention whatsoever of buying any anti-retroviral drugs for use against HIV. Didn’t notice the story? It was barely reported. The South African government wants to spend money on health infrastructure first. Okay, so where are the howls of complaint from Tina Rosenberg, John Le Carre, Anthony Lewis, and on and on? Are they only protesting against capitalism or are they serious about their campaign against AIDS? Their silence is eloquent.

My nomination for this is the repulsive English historian David Irving, the Holocaust “minimizer” and loony rightist, who, like Vidal, is a brilliant man whose mind has warped into bile. Like Vidal’s hatred for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Irving’s loathing for Winston Churchill is simply perverse. Irving has just produced the epic second volume of his biography of Churchill, a book he claims to have spent 27 years researching. According to this early review, the book is a mish-mash of tired old myths and sinister paranoia. Irving at one point says that Churchill “invariably put the interests of the United States above those of his own country and its empire,” as if, in the battle against Hitler, such conflicts were anything but distant irrelevances. He thinks it pertinent to write that Churchill was of “partly Jewish blood, although safely diluted.” He also asserts that Churchill “was ambivalent about why he was really fighting this ruinous war.” As Andrew Roberts puts it, in this ludicrous statement, Irving “is deliberately ignoring the evidence of dozens of the finest speeches ever delivered in the English tongue, which explained to Britain and the world between 1939 and 1945 in utterly uncompromising language precisely why Nazism had to be extirpated for human civilization to survive and prosper.” Amen.

THIS JUST IN: “PROPOSAL IS LATEST U.S. REACTION TO CONCERNS THAT WAX AND WANE.” – The New York Times, today.

OLD LABOUR STRIKES BACK: Here’s something even Tony Blair can’t spin. His deputy prime minister, John Prescott, punched a protestor on the face yesterday, attacking him for throwing an egg. Or did he? Most pictures of the punch show a clear swipe by the old working class lefty turned modern centrist. But the government-run BBC, which is dubbed by some in London the Blair Broadcasting Company, quickly substituted a photo in its online edition that made Prescott look the victim. Bystanders insist Prescott threw the first punch. Who you going to believe? Tony Blair’s pet media organ or your own lying eyes?