We’re all used to Paul Krugman’s insistent attacks on the Bush administration’s economic policies, his suspicion of big business, his love of high taxes and greater government spending, and his withering scorn for idle corporate bloat and what he recently called the “crony capitalism,” epitomized by Enron. So I was a little taken aback by the nugget buried in yesterday’s Times that Krugman too has been on Enron’s payroll. Even more intriguing is what he was paid for. At the very end of the article we hear Krugman’s explanation for taking $50,000 as a consultant for Enron in 1999: “This was an advisory panel that had no function that I was aware of. My later interpretation is that it was all part of the way they built an image. All in all, I was just another brick in the wall.” Run that by me again. He took $50,000 to sit on a panel that “had no function that I was aware of” except to add allure to Enron’s image? And today, he is still waxing self-righteous in his column about a corrupt system of regulation that allowed Enron to get away with financial murder. He’s right about the corruption and the need for stronger regulation. But don’t you think that someone who bemoans cronyism and corruption might, after this scandal broke, acknowledge in his own column that he himself was an Enron crony, while that company was, indeed, corrupt?
THE GATES-WEST-APPIAH CORPORATION: An amazing piece I was led to by the estimable blogger, Instapundit, in the Village Voice. It’s the best evisceration of both West’s preposterous claim to be victimized and a thoroughly skeptical look at Skip Gates’ scholarship factory at Harvard. There’s some great work in that Afro-Am Department, and in my view, the study of the black American experience is absolutely vital to any college education. But you’ve got to wonder about the quality control in a man, like Gates, who has 164 titles at Barnes and Noble’s website as works he has written, edited, co-authored or introduced. In 1996 alone, Gates produced 30 books! He makes Richard Posner look like a slacker. I’m amazed he has time even to spell-check them.
THE CHILL IN THE AIR: I woke today to a phone-call from a friend whose girlfriend’s sister lives in Thailand and has HIV. He was panic-stricken because the woman had just come down with something that looked like pneumonia. She is in her mid-twenties and was diagnosed at 16. She can barely breathe and her extremities are turning blue. I asked about her medical care. She has almost none – no meds to tackle the pneumonia, let alone the virus. She is in some makeshift hospital on an oxygen mask while her life slips away into breathlessness. For the last several years, I’ve felt enormously blessed to be spared the horrors of the early 1990s when friend after friend battled these hideous infections, and funerals, hospitals and intravenous drips filled most of my spare moments. But while the plague has turned into a disease in this country, it rages undiminished elsewhere. The worst part is that there seems so little we can practically do. The cost and infrastructure to treat the sick by Western standards on the scale required is simply beyond us or anyone. The task of prevention in these countries is also Sisyphean. I’ve written plenty of tough, skeptical pieces about the folly of easy solutions without expressing enough, perhaps, my horror at what is still happening, my solidarity as someone with HIV with those with the same virus without the same resources. We can do more to advance a vaccine if we can, the only solution that will really make a difference in the developing world. We can lobby for discounted drugs abroad, as long as they don’t undermine research as a whole and can be administered competently. We can and should give money to charities dealing with this. We can try and save one life at a time. But at some level, we have to watch while this catastrophe occurs. I’m almost ashamed that I go days without thinking of this, indeed only fully facing it when I hear of another soul, thousands of miles away, dealing with the same fear and the same bacteria and the same airlessness as my dead friends once did. May God help her and all the millions to come.
BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “A century of feminism and almost five decades of queer political consciousness have rewritten the world yet done little to change the fact that most of us (men and women, gay and straight) are fluffers — on our knees, dick in mouth, enthralled by and servicing a crushing masculinity that inflames our libido but wounds our spirits. Simply getting up off your knees is a hero’s journey.” — Ernest Hardy, LA Weekly.
GOLDHAGEN’S SCREED: The Forward, the leading Jewish newspaper, takes on the “scholar’s” bigotry and ignorance. “Rabbi David Rosen, international director of inter-religious affairs at the American Jewish Committee, said that Mr. Goldhagen ‘has an unconcealed antagonism against the Catholic Church, and it shows.'”
SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Yes, murder exists. The fear exists. The grief exists. But yes, the terrorist is a figment of our imagination-and more, a figment of our lack of imagination. The terrorist is the logical incarnation of patriarchal politics in a technological world. The terrorist is the son practicing what the father has practiced, and claiming to have found his own identity in doing so [italics original].” – Robin Morgan, “The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism.“The thesis of the book is that terrorism is a function of male patriarchy and that the United States itself is its chief practitioner. It’s now a staple of women’s studies courses.
The Dish 