Month: January 2002

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.

I think Anatole Kaletsky is too gloomy about president Bush, but his essay in today’s Times is a stimulating and provocative prediction of a conservative revival, at least in Europe. Oddly enough, the euro may well be a spur to a revived and robust nationalism in France, Germany and Italy. Kaletsky’s sharpest observation: “The cultural dominance of the baby-boom generation is creating a libertarian anti-Establishment, anti-authority bias among all advanced countries’ voters – and at present the meddling, interfering, over-regulating Establishment is identified in most European countries with the Left.” One thing is clear. Like Clintonism, Europe’s Third Way has vanished like the morning mist, leaving barely a trace behind.

Last Sunday, the New York Times ran a story about recently published documents from the Nuremberg archives, detailing the Nazis’ attempts to neutralize and destroy Christianity within Germany. Hitler’s cynical Concordat with the Catholic Church was temporary, the summary argued, because Catholic doctrine “could not be reconciled with the principle of racism.” This news must have startled any reader of last week’s essay in these pages by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, titled, “What Would Jesus Have Done?” I’ve now read Goldhagen’s essay several times to absorb what I think I was reading. Since I admired Goldhagen’s book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” and glowingly reviewed James Carroll’s book on Catholic anti-Semitism, “Constantine’s Sword,” and since, like any Catholic with a conscience, I have tried for some time to grapple with my own Church’s shameful past with respect to the Jewish people, I was looking forward to Goldhagen’s essay. What I found was something that I can only say was shocking. Indeed, the intellectual dishonesty of the essay, its elisions and conflations, its animus against Catholicism itself, would shock anyone eager to get to the bottom of this dark and difficult subject… (Continued here.)

THOSE PESKY LABELS: “The lawsuit alleges the defendants, during a Dec. 10, 2001 public meeting to discuss the awarding of minority-oriented contracts by Toyota, surrounded and assaulted Rev. Peterson — calling him “nigger” as they taunted and harmed him. Rev. Peterson is a nationally known conservative civil rights activist who has been critical of Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow/Push operation. At one point during the assault, Gregory Mathis, who hosts the nationally televised program “Judge Mathis,” is alleged to have yelled “where’s your buddy (Bill) O’Reilly (of Fox News) now?” (Rev. Peterson is a regular guest on the O’Reilly’s program, “The O’Reilly Factor.”)” – U.S. Newswire. So Peterson is a ‘conservative,’ but it is not relevant that Mathis or Jackson are left-liberals?

It’s an inspired editorial decision by Slate to pit uber-realist Bob Kaplan against neo-Kantian Bob Wright in discussing the war on Islamo-fascism. Kaplan’s opener is a corker. The most interesting aside: “Bombing [the Taliban] … led the Egyptian regime to instigate a ferocious crackdown on extremists that was little noted in the American media.” It was certainly little noted by me. Thanks for the tip, Bob.

THERE HE GOES AGAIN: Now Larry Summers has gone and nixed a potential professor for being too old. I’ve heard of ruffling feathers, and Summers gets my vote so far. But this is beginning to look less like a ruffle than a pluck.

RACE AND HONORIFICS: This just got more interesting. Another reader proffers this explanation:

“My initial reaction to the Mr v. Dr. issue regarding Cornel West was somewhat different than the “good friend” you quoted. According to Leon Litwack’s book, “Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow,” which I’m slogging through at the moment, White racist southerners traditionally had more difficulty with the implications of “Mr.” rather than “Dr.” Litwack writes on p. 334: ‘The racial code tolerated – within limits -attaching titles to the names of black professionals.’ He quotes a white person who said how relieved they were when Booker T. Washington was awarded an honorary degree from Harvard. This person thought Washington was a ‘great man,’ but couldn’t bring himself to call him Mr. Washington. When Washington got a doctorate, ‘[t]hat saved our lives! We call him ‘Dr. ‘ Washington now.’ Litwack also mentions a black college president who introduced himself to a white person as “Professor” rather than “Mr.” since, in Litwack’s words, “[t]hat usage posed no problem for whites.” Thus, traditionally, it was more of a mark of respect back then for a black to receive the honorific Mister than a formal title, which, since such titles were possessed only by an elite, apparently posed no threat to notions of white supremacy. (I am wondering whether some vestige of this curious practice explains the “Dr. King” point mentioned by your friend. ) Maybe West does not know that, or maybe knows that yet believes in today’s society the racist impulse is to deny the formal title and not the polite, general one (or maybe he’s just a pompous ass whichever way you slice it). My point is that it is wrong, though, to assume that calling black PhDs “Dr.” is mitigation for some widespread past white discrimination as to professional titles, since that particular aspect of prejudice didn’t occur.”

All clear now? By the way, here’s an official source for the Times policy. This further implies that West and Gates must have insisted on their titles.

RACIAL DOUBLE STANDARDS: Here’s a classic of the genre in – where else? – the Village Voice. It’s in a recent piece analyzing the last Mayoral election. The article discusses the racial appeals of Freddy Ferrer to blacks and Hispanics and Mark Green to Jews and whites. My view is that both candidates deserved to lose in part because of this kind of racial politics, a politics that, I might add, means that the only viable liberal in New York City is now a Republican. But that, of course, isn’t the Voice’s view. Racial appeals were legit for Ferrer but not for Green. Why? Here’s your answer:

“Ferrer’s appeals to specific ethnic groups-arguably contained in his frequent invocations of “the other New York”-cannot be held to the same standard as Green’s, not least because white voters’ priorities tend to dominate the political discussion at the expense of minority interests. ‘Clearly there are incentives for someone like Ferrer to appeal to the specific concerns of Latino and black voters,’ [Princeton politics professor Tali] Mendelberg says, ‘but those appeals are not ‘racial’ in the sense I use for appeals to white voters. They don’t draw on stereotypical anti-white thoughts or on derogations of whites, but rather on notions of what Latinos or blacks need as a group and on a worldview of American society as racist.'”

So Al Sharpton cannot really be racist; while Rudy Giuliani cannot not be racist. Figures that this piece of genius would come direct from Princeton. Maybe Dr. West and Dr. Gates should go there, after all.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “And isn’t it all just so much annoying background noise now? The war, that is. How we’re still bombing and still spending millions per day and draining the economy, still blithely massaging the feet of Rumsfeld’s gnarled war-happy ideology with the oily balms of our collective fear and dread and meek lack of willingness to question just what the hell is really going on. We’re just so used to it. Still pumping the GOP-friendly military-industrial complex full of perky aggro attitude and jingoistic testosterone and years if not decades of billion-dollar missile contracts, all to keep us fully engaged and engorged in this unwinnable war until you’ve long forgotten how to spell “Al-Qaeda” and Dick Cheney has had his defibrillator plated in platinum. This much we know.” – Mark Morford, SFGate.com, offering further proof that the anti-war left doesn’t exist.

Fascinating piece in Stratfor.com on how the media and the military have now exchanged roles in the war. The military and the Bush administration, if you listen closely, are clearly saying that this war has only just begun. They are suspicious that the Taliban is even routed yet. Work needs to be done in Iraq, Iran, Singapore, the Philippines, Somalia and elsewhere before we have a real grip on al Qaeda and its allies. Meanwhile, some elements in the media are already acting as if the war were essentially over, as if our initial and stunning victory in Afghanistan were definitive. I’m with Stratfor on this. I hope the president uses his State of the Union address to remind us that the war is still real, that we haven’t yet come close to victory, that healthy criticism of the conduct of the war is essential (as opposed to Sontag-like hostility to the war on terrorism altogether), and that all we have achieved now is the end of the beginning. Check this piece out. It’s excellent.

THE HONORIFICS, AGAIN: A good friend chides me for my item this morning. Here’s his point:

“One of the historical indignities perpetrated against blacks was the refusal of whites to use titles in addressing them….throughout most of American history (especially in the south) whites would never address blacks using “sir” or “ma’am”…”boy” or maybe their first name would be used. Even today, I think whites are generally less conscious to use titles when addressing blacks (part of the legacy of white supremacy, and our perception that they are less educated and therefore deserve or require less formality than members of other racial and ethnic groups). Another symptom of this history is an insistence by individual African-Americans that they are called by whatever they want to be called. This insistence (more emphatic, I think, than people from other cultures) is rooted in a history in which naming was denied to slaves. Finally, for a people to whom education was systematically denied and/or at the least provided for in an unjustly, inferior manner, “honorifics” have become even more important as a sign of respect for educational achievement. Thus, we so often hear people referring to “DR. King.” Educated status has a heightened importance.”

This strikes me as an important point, of which I should have been aware and more sensitive to. But it is still hard to think of millionaire media-star academics like Gates and West dealing with these issues in any serious way in a context like Harvard or at a newspaper like the New York Times. If, indeed, this is the reason for the Times’ different treatment of black or minority honorifics, then it would be useful for that policy to be made explicit, and debated.

ROOT CANAL: Just back from an hour of hell. I now get the metaphor. I was one of those rare cases where the canal actually got connected to the sinuses and so I still have bloody anti-biotic liquid dripping out my nose. Lovely.

A reader helps clear up the weird titles in Times’ stories, i.e. when they use Mr. and when they use Dr.:

“The Times explained their policy late in the Clinton administration: They would use Mr. or Mrs. unless the person being referred to asked to be designated as “Dr.” Madeleine Albright went from being “Mrs. Albright” to “Dr. Albright.” My memory is that Albright or her people had enquired why Kissinger was always Dr. Kissinger and she was Mrs. Albright. Then came the explanation and the change.”

Does this mean that West and Gates asked the Times to give them special treatment? Are they really that insecure or just pompous? Only my mother calls me Dr., and I give her a pass. Neither of my parents went to college, and it’s only understandable that they’re proud their son did. So what’s Gates’ excuse?

Nader’s irrelevance; Bush’s humor; Enron’s problem; Musharraf’s despotism. Another sharp batch.

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?

That MSN server is really out there. Here’s how they present neoliberal, Gore-voting Mickey Kaus, blogging founding father: “Conservative news site provides satire and editorials on current issues. Also provides a directory of similar right-wing resources.” He should sue.

VON HOFFMANN AWARD NOMINEE (VERY BELATED): “This crude strategy of swaggering power [i.e. the US’s attack] does not work. It does not lead to the accomplishment of minimal American purposes. This inconvenient fact is becoming embarrassingly evident as the war in Afghanistan winds down. ” – James Carroll, Boston Globe. You’ve got to admire these people. Even when there’s victory, it’s defeat.

“Mr. Powell said the Palestinian-Iranian arms smuggling is a ‘deeply disturbing problem. By the way, just as a former soldier, let me compliment the Israelis on a neat piece of work,’ said Mr. Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ‘It is deeply troubling to see the kinds of weapons that were being introduced into this volatile area,” Mr. Powell said in the Jan. 8 interview. “And I think there is a heavy burden on Chairman Arafat and the Palestinian Authority to explain what they know about this and get to the bottom of this, because this is an escalation.'”- from Bill Gertz in today’s Washington Times.

MEDIA BIAS WATCH: “Last week, Berry appealed to the president to drop attempts to appoint Peter Kirsanow, a conservative lawyer from Cleveland, to replace Victoria Wilson, an ally of Berry.” – Washington Post, January 11. So it’s relevant to describe Kirsanow as a conservative but it’s not relevant to describe Berry as a leftist or Wilson as a liberal?