Month: September 2001

The forces of barbarism have clearly struck an extraordinary blow against freedom this morning. This is not about the United States alone. It is about the survival of free societies in an open, interconnected world where forces deeply hostile to freedom can wage a new kind of war against our humanity and our success. Words fail me. But my hope is that this will awaken the sleeping tiger. When our shock recedes, our rage must be steady and resolute and unforgiving. The response must be disproportionate to the crime and must hold those states and governments that have tolerated this evil accountable. This is the single most devastating act of war since Nagasaki. It is the first time that an enemy force has invaded the precincts of the American capital since the early nineteenth century. It is more dangerous than Pearl Harbor. And it is a reminder that the forces of resentment and evil – so prominent only recently in the Durban conference – can no longer be appeased. They must be destroyed – systematically, durably, irrevocably. Perhaps now we will summon the will to do it.

With the exception of stem cell research, the international Left has become, to all intents and purposes, one of the strongest forces restraining scientific research in the world. The attacks on pharmaceutical companies have already meant a slowing of research on important diseases. The hostility to genetically modified food will only hamper efforts to advance the day when no-one in the world has to endure hunger. The opposition to nuclear power will only raise the cost of energy in the long run and ensure that the more environmentally damaging fossil fuels will remain our major energy source for decades. Now comes news from the Independent in London that an important tool for understanding human genetic diversity has been scrapped after a political campaign against it. After ten years of effort, the Human Genome Diversity Project is now all but history. It was an attempt to understand genetic variations between different ethnicities in order to fashion better tools for curing disease, and enhancing our understanding of human pre-history. Of course, the Left loathes the possibility that actual genetic differences exist between racial groups, despite evidence that subtle differences do in fact exist. Representatives of indigenous peoples – groups that may soon disappear as separate genetic entities because of urbanization, inter-marriage and migration – complained that the data might be used for – shock, horror – commercial purposes. Much of the Western scientific establishment, terrified of any politically incorrect science, also helped stifle the project. The result might be an understanding of the human genome that is useless in addressing specific diseases in different populations. The notion that this research in itself is racist reminds me of the know-nothing attitude of so many liberals to the data of “The Bell Curve.” We don’t want to know, was the liberal refrain. I like the quote from one of the scientists on the project addressing this issue: “”The blatant lies that went on,” Professor Kevin Kidd of Yale University, said. “I was insulted to my face. The project was called unethical when it was an attempt to put the research on an ethical basis. To study differences is not racist. Racists don’t need to study differences, they are doing just fine as they are.” Amen, but try telling that to the Luddite fundamentalists on the left.

THE ANIMAL HOLOCAUST CONTINUES: After the Blair government’s alternately horrifying and incompetent attempt to deal with foot and mouth disease this spring comes new horror. The inhumane and hideous slaughter of hundreds of thousands of cattle and sheep for purely economic reasons didn’t rescue the British market and didn’t immediately wipe out foot and mouth disease. Now, consumers have gone off beef altogether, prices for cattle have collapsed and the cost of transporting calves to France where they can still be sold for veal has out-stripped the value of the calves. So now they’re killing the calves at birth – all 200,000 of them – and burying them in mass graves. I thought it couldn’t get any worse than last spring’s massacre. But it has. “Ethically, it stinks,” is how one farmer put it to the Daily Telegraph. To high heaven.

LETTERS: A chilling economic parallel between Britain in 1989 and America in 2001.

MR BLANK: My take on Colin Powell’s non-influence in the Bush administration: woohoo. Check out my new piece opposite.

Mickey Kaus makes a sensible if boring point that the current budget debate is being over-played. Neither Bush’s predictions nor even the direst prognostications from outside see the future fiscal situation heading back to the kind of deficits of the 1980s and early 1990s. The most likely scenario is one in which the government is largely starved of much money for the next decade except to finance social security and Medicare (without much of a senior drug benefit). Mickey thinks this is good for Democrats because they can always rescind some of the tax cuts in future years to pay for their spending plans. It’s all going according to plan, Mickey reassures his Democratic readers. Really? Already, there’s mounting pressure not to raise taxes any further but to reduce them still more. Republicans are pushing for a capital gains tax reduction; Democrats want to see a reduction in the payroll tax. I’d pick the Democratic option myself, since I’d like to see a more even-handed tax cut than the one proposed by Bush. But whoever wins, doesn’t this mean a deep change in the debate? A year ago, we faced a Congress spending double the rate of inflation and a candidate Al Gore wanting only modest tax breaks for middle-class heterosexual families and a vast expansion of government spending. Today, we have a big tax cut, neutered spending plans, and perhaps a bigger tax cut coming soon. Yes, you can make the semantic point that Bush wants spending increases as well. But Bush doesn’t need to deliver on spending the way the Democrats do. And I’m still not convinced that any tax hikes in the near future – especially in sluggish economic times – can be anything but political poison. What Bush has done is to squash a small and rare window in fiscal history where a real expansion of government for more middle class entitlements was imaginable. Those of us who will paying taxes for decades to come will eventually be grateful we closed that window swiftly. And Bush’s sense of priorities in this respect seems retroactively exactly right.

EDWARDS WATCH: Interesting snippet from the somewhat unread Saturday edition of the New York Post, highlighted by one of my readers among Edwards fans. He’s clearly someone to watch closely. If Clinton is behind him, all the more so: “AL Gore didn’t want Bill Clinton’s help in last year’s presidential race, but other presidential wannabes – gearing up for the 2004 election – do. Citing Clinton’s phenomenal way of pulling in the cash, spies in D.C. say North Carolina Sen. John Edwards has been haranguing him for help with a presidential fund drive. “Edwards calls Clinton [in Harlem] at least once a week,” our source added. So far, Edwards’ tenacity has paid off: Clinton has been raving about Edwards in private to some of his biggest fundraisers. “These are private conversations,” said Julia Payne, Clinton’s rep.”

ROLLING OR STONED?: Diverting piece in the Village Voice echoing some of my beliefs about the relative harmlessness of Ecstasy compared to many other legal, prescription drugs. It seems there is much scientific debate about how harmful ecstasy is over the long term and how the costs weigh against benefits in only occasional use. But finding some sane resolution to this debate – which would require studying Ecstasy’s beneficial and therapeutic effects as well as its dangers – cannot be fully conducted until the current loopy official prohibition of the drug is lifted. So we’ll never know, and the prohibitionist mentality, with all its baleful effects on our criminal justice system, continues. And no leader in either party is prepared to open up this debate.

LETTERS: My double-standard with Garry Trudeau and Roger Ebert; gay cookouts, etc.

WHAT A DRAG: I dropped by the kind of drag show in Provincetown last Friday night I would never usually attend: a drag show for straight people. It was called “Guys As Dolls,” and featured Barbra and Marilyn look-a-likes and brought lots of appreciative oohs and aahs from the largely hetero crowd. The gay guys in audience, I’d say, found it tedious (although one of the performers was pretty great as Susan Lucci in her final Emmy acceptance speech). In fact, there are clearly two kinds of drag shows now around: celebrity imitators for straights and a much different form of theater for gays. Drag for gays these days actually eschews trying to pass off as women, instead caricaturing the way in which our culture promotes and rewards crass diva-dom. The uglier and crasser the impersonation the funnier. In many, there’s a whiff of misogyny as well, but it’s saved by equal doses of sympathy for the way in which straight women still contort themselves for the pleasure and amusement of straight men. But my point is that this newish kind of drag is ironic, amused, detached, self-mocking. It’s post-drag, if you will. And what this goes to show is that drag is changing as the role of gays changes. Gay men do not need to pretend to be women any more to win attention; we can merely play at being men playing at being women. Within a couple of decades, I think, even this may dissipate some, as the whole conflation of homosexuality with gender-transgression fades, and as gay men and lesbians reclaim more fully their respective genders. Drag may eventually disappear altogether – which will be a shame in one respect, since it’s a glorious and wonderful tradition. But I won’t be sad to see the days pass when gay men had to pass as effeminate or almost indistinguishable from women to gain a foothold of recognition or acceptance. If drag collapses because gay freedom thrives, then it will be a worthwhile trade-off.

Hitch scores a home-run on this one. Are we the only two people who think Clinton’s crimes were far, far worse than Condit’s sins?

PIGS FLY: Could it be that the gay left is waking up? This following passage could have been written by yours truly: “The bottom line is that GLAAD has more in common than not with right-wing, religion-based groups that have railed against such works as Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. In condemning Dogma, a film about two renegade angels who have been kicked out of heaven (played by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck), the Catholic League was, in essence, saying that there is only one correct way to represent Christian beliefs. GLAAD, in condemning Jay and Silent Bob, is claiming that there is only one correct way to represent homosexuality through art. If the former is religious fundamentalism, the latter is sexual-identity fundamentalism.” In fact, it’s by Michael Bronski, a far-left activist, who delighted in trashing my private life earlier this year. Has he received new instructions from the Red Guard?

SHARPTON’S THUGS: A very similar piece to Rod Dreher’s about the weird excess of Aaliyah’s funeral and media hype has been written in Salon. I doubt whether Sharpton will call out his hoodlums for this one. It doesn’t serve his political agenda in New York. Which only makes his persecution of Rod Dreher that much more disgraceful.

LETTERS: Why Rod Dreher is a boor; why I’m a sell-out; why Trudeau is a wimp; etc.

Perhaps the most depressing media news of the month so far is that Paula Zahn, the woman who put psychics on her show as serious commentators, is rewarded by tripling her salary and moving to CNN. Somehow I think the worst of media hell is yet to come.

THE WAR AGAINST FREE SPEECH: Imagine if a black columnist had written a column about some stupid and overly elaborate funeral of some minor white television celebrity. Legitimate cultural criticism, no? It certainly wouldn’t prompt an outpouring of threats, protests, multiple hate-filled calls to the Post’s switchboard and over 2,000 angry emails to the columnist’s newspaper. Yet this is what has happened to Rod Dreher of the New York Post, who had the effrontery to write a pointed criticism of the extravagant funeral for a young black singer Aaliyah, who died recently in a plane crash. Read it for yourself. It may betray a certain ignorance of Aaliyah’s relevance in hip-hop subculture, but I can’t see anything even vaguely racist about it. Still, Al Sharpton unleashed his thugs, calling a press conference to denounce Dreher as a bigot. Dreher is now besieged, according to his friends and colleagues. He may have to work at home because of threats on his life at work. I’m told he’s growing a beard to disguise his appearance. One recent message on his voicemail went: “Look, white bitch, you’re not answering your phone, but you can’t hide forever. One of us is going to be waiting for you outside your building, and you’re gonna be thinking you’re going home, but we’re gonna step out and choke yo’ muthafuckin’ neck.” Now where are all the usual guardians of free speech defending Dreher and condemning this vile campaign of intimidation against him? Or are condemnations of people who threaten the lives of writers only appropriate if the target is a liberal? The New York Post, friendly hacks tell me, is apparently imposing public silence on Dreher so as not to stir up even more hostility. I emailed Rod for confirmation, but he referred me to the p.r. company handling this for the Post. This is chilling. Dreher’s column was innocuous enough – but even if it was not innocuous, he shouldn’t be frightened of walking on the streets without being attacked. The response of any other journalist should not be to acquiesce in this cowardly silence, but to speak up and out about this pathological hatred that is now so sadly accepted among some minority groups. This is a form of terrorism. It’s designed to intimidate journalists from doing their job. I’ve gotten death threats before – but nothing this terrifying. And the most terrifying thing of all is the silence of Dreher’s professional colleagues. Perhaps they don’t know yet what he’s going through. I hope they do now.

LETTERS: A Heche-free zone; what really happened to Chandra; the trouble with steroids; why some criticism of Israeli racism is legit; etc.

THE FORMER EASTERN BLOC VERSUS DURBAN: One heartening piece of news from the World Conference Against Racism and Stuff is the statement from the Non-Government Organizations from the former eastern bloc, including many Russian democrats. They knew the score, arguing that, “We must emphasize that the language of the chapter “Palestinians and Palestine” as well as the deliberate distortions made to the chapter “Anti-Semitism” is extremely intolerant, disrespectful and contrary to the very spirit of the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.” Their post-script is priceless: “PS: On top of all the troubles of the NGO Forum, at the closing ceremony, the delegates had to listen for over two hours to a speech by Fidel Castro. We are offended by the fact that one of the worst dictators in the contemporary world, particularly notorious for gross violations of human rights, was invited to address this world gathering of non-governmental organizations. Listening to Fidel speak, we only had to wonder why the organizers had failed to invite Alexander Lukashenko, Turkmenbashi, Saddam Hussein, or a representative of the Taliban regime.” Amen.

TRUDEAU’S NON-APOLOGY: We all make mistakes. But someone’s character is best displayed in how they fess up to them. See what you think of Garry Trudeau’s attempt to respond to his own parlaying in a comic strip a hoax story about the allegedly low I.Q. of President Bush: “Many thoughtful readers, including those sampled above, have expressed an interest in the “Presidential IQ” story, an internet hoax which was portrayed as factual in a recent strip. This was a regrettable error, although perhaps inevitable, given that this feature uses the same fact-checking house as Saturday Night Live and The Drudge Report. Trudeau takes full responsibility, acknowledging the use of fictional material from an outside source instead of simply making it up as he usually does. The creator deeply apologizes for unsettling anyone who was under the impression that the President is, in fact, quite intelligent.” Graceless, in my book.

KKK UPDATE: The Washington Post and the Boston Globe have run fair retractions of their previous stories on the alleged hate crime. Good for them.

The hate-crime that turned out to be hoax, a reader tells me, was first reported in the New York Daily News, the Los Angeles Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Washington Post. Let me know if you see a correction in any of these papers. It’ll be interesting to see if they bother.

POSEUR ALERT I: “There’s a giant swan on the cover of Vespertine, Björk’s newest album (out last week), and Björk once again sports the swan dress in all her photos. I’m unable to suss out the waterfowl semiotics at play here, but I did notice that Björk.com has line-drawings of a duck. As for the album title, “vespertine” means crepuscular-blossoming at dusk, like vesper prayers. In contrast to the bombast of earlier Björk tunes, Vespertine is a dusky, twilight creation. It’s electronic music, but no one will dance to it. It made me want to curl up in an egg chair, pull a few mellow tokes, and work on my macrame.” – Seth Stevenson, Slate.

HOTLINE SCOOP: According to the Hotline, I’m a liberal pundit. Why didn’t they tell Peter Beinart that?

POSEUR ALERT II: “This evening the water crept slowly away toward low tide, like a purple pool of mercury, and then the low red moon grew over the horizon. The final drag shows are closing; the bar patrons dwindle; the seasonal townies gather for long bull sessions over smoke and wine. This has been a vintage summer, but its ending has been a classic.” – Andrew Sullivan, andrewsullivan.com.

THOSE CANNY BRITS: Fresh from reprinting the hoax survey of presidential I.Q.s as if it were fact, the Guardian of London just ran the following item: “Commiserations to Palatino, Geneva and the rest, but the champion at Tuesday’s 73rd annual Fonty Awards in Los Angeles was Helvetica Bold Oblique, which took home 11 statues, including 2001 Best Font. “A million thanks to all the wonderful folks in the font community who believed in Helvetica Bold Oblique,” said its jubilant designer Oliver Gwynneth Rudd. “Without your faith in my vision, I would not be here before you tonight.” Now stop that, Oliver, before we all get the moists.” The provenance of the story? The Onion! And the Brits think Americans have an irony deficiency?

As usual, a terrific piece from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. I wish I could link to it but the snobs at that magazine think it’s beneath them. Malcolm breaks a taboo I have long since found troublesome. Why are we concerned that most athletes these days use increasingly sophisticated steroids and performance enhancers? He rightly scoffs at those in denial about this; and just as smartly shows how it’s all but impossible to test accurately and fairly for their use. Today’s ramshackle testing regimen merely punishes those with the least sophisticated doctors and trainers. So why not just give in? The case against, I suppose, is that steroids are an unfair advantage in sports. So what? Our genes are the deepest unfairness in this respect. Some of us just aren’t made to be great athletes; others are. Why is the dumb luck of genetics somehow morally superior to the contrived success of training and pharmaceuticals? Then there’s the argument that excellence in sports is somehow morally better if it’s related entirely to ‘effort.’ Maybe, but most steroids enhance the ability of athletes to recover from hard training, and so boost their performance primarily by allowing athletes to train harder, giving greater emphasis to effort. Besides, most of these drugs simulate the body’s own ‘natural’ chemicals. Why should someone with a genetically higher level of, say, testosterone be deemed morally superior to someone who gets it from a vial? Beats me. Gladwell is right, I think, to argue that we should simply put limits on the upper end of steroid use and allow everyone below that measurable level to compete using drugs. I’d favor legalizing and deregulating their use for amateurs as well. Athletes will have to determine whether this will impact their long-term health and well-being, and minors should be protected from abuse. But apart from that, I share Gladwell’s insouciance toward the whole area. Maybe it’s because I’ve been on testosterone therapy for a few years now and seen what human growth hormone can do for the emaciation and deformation many people with long-term HIV endure. But like many other pharmaceuticals, steroids can enhance our human experience. They could enhance our sports experience as well. In fact, of course, they already have.

A.S. T.R.B. R.I.P.: I’m sad to say that last week turns out to have been my last TRB column. I had a year’s contract and my editor, Peter Beinart, told me last week that my time is up and he now wants to write it himself. I don’t have much to say except I am very sad not to be able to continue but that I had a blast and am glad to have been allowed to write openly and honestly for a year – even when the column often tilted against the current of the magazine. I’ll take a breather from column writing for the next couple of months before reassessing. I have a couple of long essays I want to finish. Meantime, I’ll still be a senior editor at TNR, writing weekly for the Sunday Times in London; writing more for the New York Times Magazine; and updating the Dish daily. I’d like to thank all the editors, fact-checkers, and emailers who helped me fill a space I have long revered in American journalism and wish Peter all the best in carrying on the tradition. Any further questions people might have about this should be directed to TNR’s editor, Peter Beinart.

THE EXODUS: Provincetown now is the place I’ve been waiting all summer for. In a matter of days, the throngs have all disappeared. I wake up to a largely deserted beach and walk the dog to the local bakery for coffee and scones. The light pierces everything – and the clearer fall air focuses it. This evening the water crept slowly away toward low tide, like a purple pool of mercury, and then the low red moon grew over the horizon. The final drag shows are closing; the bar patrons dwindle; the seasonal townies gather for long bull sessions over smoke and wine. This has been a vintage summer, but its ending has been a classic.

ANOTHER HATE-CRIME HOAX: Like the church burnings of a few years ago, this one was too good to check. A woman who had claimed that she had had the initials KKK carved on her body now admits it was self-inflicted. I don’t think we should simply dismiss this kind of thing as simple loopiness. There’s a need here – a need for relevance, a need to matter. And mattering these days, from Durban to Texas, means being a victim of something called ‘racism,’ increasingly a receptacle for the all the inchoate grievances many of us have and refuse to overcome. That is not to say that racism doesn’t exist. But it is to say that its centrality in our culture is a very strange disorder. What deeper anxiety, I wonder, is this really all about?

“Israeli Arabs have an easier time having their votes counted than blacks in some parts of Florida do.” – Michael Lerner, New York Times today.

A new low for Maureen Dowd’s sadly knee-jerk dismissal of Bush. She’s really better than this. Maybe this column makes a good faith attempt to explain why some people disagree with missile defense. Or maybe it’s worthy of Molly Ivins. I particularly liked this group of sentences: “The last time a president became infatuated with Star Wars, the obsession was easier to understand. Ronald Reagan was by temperament a utopian. He believed that the unattainable was attainable. He confused real life with the movies.” And of course, Reagan turned out to be a fool, his foreign policy collapsing into thin air, his delusion that Star Wars might hasten the demise of the Soviet Union pure fantasy. Why, the end of the Cold War was just a figment of his movie-addled imagination! Does Maureen still buy this interpretation of Reagan? Was she alive in the late 1980s? Or is this just more crowd-pleasing throw-aways for know-nothing blue-zoners? On another matter, imagine a column being written that made the same simple assumptions about another completely risky, utterly unproven and possibly dangerous area of research: on embryonic stem cells. Now imagine it in the New York Times.

IAIN DUNCAN PAPIST: I remember a telling moment when I was a whipper-snapper on the editorial board of the Daily Telegraph at the tender age of 20. Under the tutelage of a wonderfully erudite and funny man, Peter Utley, it was my job to write editorials while the real editors were on vacation or on an extremely long lunch. Peter was a ferocious Unionist and Anglican and saw both identities as central to what English conservatism was all about. I once asked him, in jest, if a good Catholic could really be a Tory. Peter replied in all seriousness that this was a deeply vexing question. I was a little stunned. A gay Catholic, I quietly surmised, might as well join the Socialist Workers Party. So how remarkable that the front-runner for the Tory leadership, Iain Duncan Smith, is a) a practicing Catholic and that b) no-one has even mentioned this. An interesting piece in the Irish Independent notices. What a difference it might make to those Catholics still persecuted in Ulster to have a prime minister who actually shares their faith.

THE RESILIENCE OF BIGOTRY: Two stories from different parts of the world, revealing just how vile humanity is. In Ulster, Unionist bigots traumatized elementary school children for the crime of going to a Catholic school in a predominantly Protestant enclave. My recent skepticism of the IRA should not, I hope, be taken as implicit support for the poisonous hatred that some Protestants in Ulster still hold for Catholics. Having endured anti-Catholic sneers of a far milder kind growing up in a state high school in England, I’m under few illusions as to the sweetness and light of some unreconstructed Protestants. And these school kids face yet more barrages of hate in the days to come. Then in the Times of London, some more reporting about the bigotry vented in Durban. It seems that Egypt told the U.S. that Cairo would never accept a conference declaration that didn’t condemn Israel as inherently “racist.” The Times goes on: “The warning was accompanied by a statement from Syria saying that the Holocaust, in which more than six million Jews lost their lives, was a “Jewish lie” and a demand from Iran that anti-Semitism should not be accepted as discrimination because it was not “a contemporary form of racism”.” These are the people with whom the Israelis are urged to make peace.