The following are the only books on Amazon.com to beat our book-club choice for February yesterday evening at 9pm: John Grisham’s latest; a self-help book; a Stephen King TV series tie-in; and “Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm.” Then comes our little book – jammed with Churchill, Thucydides, Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli and Montesquieu. I think we just single-handedly elevated the culture a little, don’t you, and I’m more than a little stunned. If you want to take part in this Internet experiment of a book club, check out the Book Club page which will tell you all you need to know. I started reading the book today, and will be posting my and then your first impressions February 18. Then the fun begins.
THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE: One Mona Eltahawy writes eloquently this morning in the Washington Post about the real issue behind the veiling of Afghan women. That issue is not the burqa itself, she argues, a piece of clothing that is in many places an integral part of indigenous social customs. The issue is the matter of choice: whether women can freely choose to wear such a piece of clothing or not. Eltahawy is on to something here. I find the burqa repulsive as a symbol of women’s oppression, marginalization and invisibility. But it’s a step too far to believe therefore that every burqa means that. And it further demeans the deeper autonomy of women to assume that some could not make that choice out of their own free will. A freely-chosen faith or custom, however abhorrent to outsiders, is not something good liberals should seek to reform or abolish. What good liberals should seek to abolish is the political tyranny that makes real choice for women such an impossibility in such cultures. That’s why feminists should be behind this war – and the war to liberate Iraq and Iran. Not because women will be freed of burqas, but because people will be freed from the tyranny that makes female dignity and equality impossible.
KRUGMAN UPS THE ANTE: Today’s column from Paul Krugman makes Paul Begala look positively non-partisan. There’s first a strained attempt at the most ambitious-yet Enron analogy. Krugman charges that “on the basis of surplus fantasies, the administration – aided by an audit committee, otherwise known as the U.S. Congress, that failed to exercise due diligence – gave itself a big bonus in the form of a huge tax cut.” Ergo, Congress is Arthur Andersen. Ergo, Bush is Enron. Q.E.D. But wait a minute. For this analogy to even begin to work, wouldn’t the tax cut have to have been applied only to the members of the administration? And wouldn’t the Congress, including many Democrats, have to have been complicit in that? And wouldn’t the tax-payers, like Enron’s shareholders, have been fleeced rather than reimbursed? You have to wonder if Krugman has so bought his own demagoguery that for a split second he almost believed that. Or is he just equating Ken Lay and George W. Bush anyhow, anyway, by any rhetorical means? Then there’s the extraordinary argument that the Bush administration has cynically used the tragedy of September 11 to add to its budget a “one-time charge” – an “accounting trick” worthy of Enron’s crooks. That “one-time charge,” you see, is the new defense budget! It’s a phony new charge, in Krugman’s view, made purely to cook the books to distract attention from Ken Lay-style embezzlement by the president. Think of that for a minute. Krugman is asserting that the Bush administration’s response to the terrorist attacks of last fall was not designed actually to protect us from danger or to defeat a real threat – but in order to preserve their malevolent fiscal agenda, aimed at their own enrichment. Our current war is therefore nothing less than a conscious, cynical attempt by Bush to rob the American tax-payer in order to shovel money at corporate defense contractors and the rich, regardless of the country’s military, fiscal or economic needs. I guess at least we now know what Krugman really thinks. He and Ramsey Clark and Noam Chomsky seem to have a huge amount now in common.
INSULTS, CONTINUED: Churchill has been a favorite of yours, especially the faint damnations of Clement Atlee. With Chamberlain, however, Churchill was just as funny but also deadly. One reader emails to remind me that Churchill once said of his predecessor as prime minister: “He looked at foreign affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.” And then he was able to take off the gloves completely, in analyzing Chamberlain’s character: “At the depths of that dusty soul there is nothing but abject surrender.” Brutal. But for sheer malevolent delight, it’s hard to beat Melville on Emerson: “I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw. It was the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.” And all I can think of is Al Gore.
The Dish 