Several joyful lefties have emailed me to say that the United People’s website is based in Denmark, not the U.S. Hence no fifth column. I wish. Check out the names and faces of the “committed organizers” – there are many Americans, on campuses and elsewhere throughout the country. Websites can be registered anywhere (the one you’re reading is written in D.C., Ptown and Chicago, uploaded in Seattle, managed in New York, and transmitted worldwide). What matters is the provenance of the people behind it. A core group of these people are indeed Americans, from, among other places, Minnesota, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Redwood Valley, and Albuquerque. One of them, Kevin Danaher, named as a “committed organizer” of this organization, just had an op-ed published in the Washington Post. Did the Post’s editors vet his credentials?
HERE THEY GO AGAIN: Fresh on the heels of the news that gay servicemembers risking their lives for their country will nevertheless risk expulsion at any time, come the pleasant remarks of Lou Sheldon, a major figure of the religious right. According to the Washington Post, Sheldon wants to bar any aid for the spouses or families of gay victims of the September 11 attacks. Do these people have any clue about the true meaning of the Gospels? Or any clue about the meaning of America?
POSEUR ALERT: “We’d abided so long in our shimmering impassive skins, sealed like airplanes ourselves, stationary airplanes: climate-controlled, with weather and pestilence and human frailty all sheltered inside. More than just the world’s largest filing cabinets, my other and I were bodies undertaking a long consideration of space, ticking off earth-rotations, swatting birds. When after so very long the new body entered mine I was accepting, more than I might have predicted. Though I shivered I tried to permit myself to learn what it had to teach me, this intersection of presences. Beside me was another struggle with the same knowledge: two brides, two grooms. But the marriages were brief. The lesson opaque. No, J.G. Ballard crap isn’t going to do it either, exaggerated empathy for the machines and buildings won’t help anything, won’t get me out of what I’m still trying not to feel.” – Jonathan Lethem, Rolling Stone. I think he’s talking about the WTC massacre.
The Dish 