Month: January 2002

After September 11 and the president’s speech to Congress in which he laid out a clear doctrine of zero tolerance for terrorism, it seems to me our foreign policy is clear. Both Israel and India – at either ends of the Islamic Middle East – must be unequivocally supported in their struggles against Islamo-fascism. Both are democracies; both allow freedom of religion; both have enemies who are friendly with the perpetrators of the WTC massacre. To play footsie with either country now, to do anything but provide extremely clear public support, would deeply undermine the integrity of our own struggle against this destabilizing evil. I see no evidence that the administration has done anything but back both countries – but for a while there, I had real worries that the same kind of moral equivalence that we falsely ascribe to Israel and the PLOHamasHizbollah was one we were beginning to apply to India and Pakistani-sponsored terrorist groups. I’m with India on this one, and am glad they pushed this principle to the brink of warfare to get their message across.

LETTERS: Straight readers sympathize with the double standards applied to gay lives and relationships.

FOXY LOGIC: I pretty much agree with the Wall Street Journal editorial today, giving an unneeded fillip to Bernie Goldberg expose of hyper-liberal CBS. But I do have a problem with part of it. The Journal praises Fox News as “an organization that delivers news straight, without tilting left or right.” Oh, come on. Now, Fox News does some great stuff. They’re fresher, smarter and often more balanced than the network news. But obviously, they tilt right, often helpfully so. So why give us this guff about “we report, you decide,” etc, etc. It’s great p.r., I guess, if lies are good p.r. But it’s not even vaguely true. What bugs me about CBS and ABC and NBC News is not that they are left-leaning, which is completely fair enough, but that they refuse to admit it. I don’t begrudge Peter Jennings his left-liberalism. I begrudge him his pomposity and pretense to objectivity. It seems to me that as long as Fox plays the same Jennings game, tacking right while refusing to acknowledge its own bias, it’s going to be hard for conservative cultural critics to gain much high ground in this debate.

It ended in typical fashion. I made it to the “Lord of the Rings,” only to find it was sold out. After a Mickey D’s Number 2, I rented a movie and watched it with the beagle. At approximately 10.45 pm, my toilet exploded. It had been dripping for a couple of days but this was hardly the weekend to call a plumber. I figured I would find one after New Year’s. Then as I plopped myself innocently down on the porcelain, a fizzing sound behind me became a gushing sound and water was suddenly pouring into my apartment like a geyser. I tried to turn off the valve through the torrent – but it was the valve that was broken. My wonderful neighbors, enjoying a New Year’s Eve bash next door and upstairs, took control and started bailing the water into my trash can. It was filling up every 45 seconds or so. One of them finally shoved a pen into the pipe to stop the flow. Pity it was a red ink pen. It exploded too, and my neighbors look a little pink today. We tried again with a ballpen. More success. After about half an hour of my acting like Shelley Winters in the Poseidon Adventure, I called a friend in construction and he showed up like a Guardian Angel in a few minutes and managed to locate the cold water switch in my apartment. (I know, I know. I’m clueless). Old Faithful subsided, and I gave my savior some Moet and took him out to a dance-club for the night. I got back around 6am, crashed and woke up an hour ago. I have a hangover, but still have no water and it’s New Year’s Day and even the gym is closed. I’ll use my next door neighbor’s shower. Thank God I live in a condo building. My only consolation is that this particular piece of comedy can still be psychologically attributed to 2001. May the new year get better.