National Review’s Jay Nordlinger asks an interesting question. Why does the New York Times, which routinely (and mercifully) only identifies PhDs as Mr,’s and Mrs.’s, always refer to Skip Gates and Cornel West as Dr. Gates and Dr. West? Larry Summers, despite his being a PhD and president of the actual university, merely gets called “Mr.” I wonder if there’s some ordinary explanation here in the copy department (that department has some wonderfully arcane ideas, as anyone who has ever written for the Times will attest.) Or is it a new rule that minorities get different honorifics than non-minorities? If it were a general principle, it wouldn’t be that far off affirmative action, anyway, would it? Part of the principle of racial preferences, after all, is to pretend that students with lower scores actually have the same scores as others, or even higher. So why not extend that to honorifics? They’re far less meaningful than grades. Maybe in future a non-minority with a PhD will be addressed as if he just got a masters; and a minority with a masters will get an automatic upgrade to PhD. Not so much grade inflation, as title inflation. And only for some races, not others. What’s not to like, Dr. West?
THAT GAY CHANNEL: Here’s a funny piece about it. I’m in it. Cracked me up. But it’s still depressing that there might be such a thing. Yes, I know everyone else has a niche market. But this is one instant when I worry that the free market might actually be a bad thing for gays. The great achievement of the last few years has been the mainstreaming of openly gay writers, thinkers, actors, sportsmen and women, teachers, priests, et al into the regular culture. It’s also been wonderful to see just normal gay people in mainstream soaps, sitcoms, movies, magazines and so on. Isn’t a retreat into a specially designated niche channel something of a step backward? I know it’s a great ad market, but do we really have to balkanize even further?
SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Back home in Loonsville, our misfits have two choices. Play baseball, date cheerleaders and dance in formation at parties or declare yourself a Nietzschean xdcbermensch, get fucked up on heroin, refuse to accept the constraints of monogamy and write songs about killing your wife. In the former camp, we find 99% of all Americans. In the latter, the chainsaw-wielding minority whose reaction to being disappeared was to amplify their agony to a level where even their fellow Americans can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist. There isn’t a middle ground.” – anti-American bigot Charlotte Raven, explaining why British culture is so superior to America. Are you in that lonely one percent as well?
MILLER ON CLINTON: Here’s part of Democratic Senator Zell Miller’s remarks to the Georgia Chamber of Commerce Monday night. The message is getting through:
“I had watched in great disappointment when we did nothing after the terrorists first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six and injuring more than 1,000 Americans. Then again, when 16 U.S. servicemen were killed in the bombing of the Khobar Towers in 1996 and we still did nothing. I watched when U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Nairobi were attacked in 1998, killing 263 persons, and the only response we made was firing a few missiles on an empty terrorist camp. It was a wimpy response so totally inadequate I was ashamed.”
GOLDHAGEN UPDATE: I know I promised a report on Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s essay in the New Republic on the Catholic Church’s record during the Holocaust. Goldhagen’s piece is not on the web, following his publisher’s wishes. But the piece is extraordinary in its claims, and my baffled response to it will appear soon.
NO CLEMENT ATTLEE: That Bob Kuttner sure has a gift for compliments. “This is not World War II, and Tom Daschle is no Clement Attlee,” worries Crazy Bob in the American Prospect. I think I know what Kuttner is saying. But he must realize that the most famous description of this meek, talent-free prime minister was Churchill’s axiom that “Mr. Attlee is a very modest man with a great deal to be modest about.” And Daschle doesn’t even make that grade?
WORTHY OF FLORA LEWIS: I remember reading for many years that grand old writer’s bland and high-minded missives about “Europe.” Jim Hoagland pulls a classic Flora this morning. The assumption of Hoagland’s piece is that further European political integration is obviously a good thing, and anything that imperils it is obviously bad. Why? He never tells us. He just utters Flora-like bromides that “the political genius of Europe in the second half of the 20th century was to spin new webs of economic and political union out of adversity and challenge.” Blather. Notice in this piece that a democratically elected prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is obviously suspect, because he finds the Euro creepy, unnecessary and undemocratic. Notice also that a retired, failed French president, Giscard D’Estaing, is obviously a statesman because he wants to foist political unification on European countries who have no need for it. D’Estaing has been appointed (because no EU big-shot is ever elected) to oversea the next phase of Anschluss. Hoagland gets almost excited at the very thought: “Giscard has the talent and ambition to use the convention as a platform to show Europe what it is missing by its not having a president.” Huh? A retired, unelected bureaucratic busybody with no popular mandate can show Europeans what they’re missing without a president? Is Hoagland serious?
The Dish 