Safire has an invaluable column today on Saddam’s al Qaeda wing, attempting to attack and destabilize our Kurdish allies in the north. I have no doubt that the president is intent on removing Saddam from power. But I have much doubt that the C.I.A. is willing or able to help him, or that the know-it-alls at the State Department aren’t daily coming up with excuses for delay. I thought this was a race against time, guys. Those Americans who are in danger of being killed by a Saddam-Qaeda chemical, biological or semi-nuclear attack should keep reminding the administration of this. The current Iraqi-Iranian-Syrian initiative in arming Palestinians to murder their way onto our Middle East agenda should not affect our time-table in any way. If it does, we are simply inviting more such mischief.
TWO CHEERS FOR THE MONARCHY: “The reason we should try to feel emotion at the death of the Queen Mother is not because we knew her, or felt we knew her, or even had the slightest inclination to know her. It’s because she was there when our great-grandparents were there; she was there as an infant under Victoria; she was there as a teenager as the First World War destroyed a generation and as a depression laid waste to another. She was there when Britain was blitzed and when it rebuilt and when it staggered into decline and then revived. She was there when Britain was an empire and when it was a member of the European Union. Mourning her is not really about her; it’s about us.” A modest defense of a monarchy – in my latest piece, posted here.
A GIDDY THING: It’s been an exhausting weekend – about six hours of rehearsal a day. And have you tried memorizing lines like this one: “‘I took no more pains for those thanks than you took pains to thank me.’ That’s as much as to say: ‘Any pains that I took for you is as easy as thanks'”? Maybe I’m a lot older; maybe I have ingested too many foreign substances over the years; maybe ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ is a peculiarly ornate piece of dramatic rhetoric; but, boy, has it been tough getting these words to become completely automatic. My poor beagle hasn’t been able to get a word in edgewise for weeks. Still, it’s not as if I’m memorizing, say, Tony Kushner. My favorite Benedick line as of now is: “Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humor?” Just the technical wonder of the deceptively simple composition – and the sheer sound of the words – thrill me. Actually, feeling my way gradually through the character of Benedick this past month – his emotional dysfunction, his wit, his nerve, his sexual confusion, his obnoxiousness, his honesty, his vulnerability – has been a wonderful exercise in how stupendously brilliant Shakespeare is. I know this is hardly news – but I know no better way to really absorb and appreciate Shakespeare than actually trying to act, speaking the words he wrote. With each rehearsal, you find something new. As you slowly leave the script behind and let the lines guide you forward, you find yet another – and another! – aspect of this complex, subtle human being coming into relief. Parts of him remind me of so many different people, and there are so many choices, and yet in the end you rest on the words themselves, and they create this extraordinary complex of feeling and perception between you, and your character, and his author, and anyone observing. Well, before I give myself a ‘poseur alert,’ I just have to say it’s a relief to be another person for while – even in play. We modern adults surely don’t play enough. And I don’t mean drinking or carousing or drugs or professional sports or whatever. I mean the kind of serious frivolity that children practice all the time and that allows them to grow. This play is seriously hard work, but its playfulness truly refreshes the spirit. Still, my weekend was made by dinner last night with Charles Francis (a supporter of the site) and Bjorn Lomborg, the current author of this month’s book club selection. We didn’t talk about the environment. But we had a great time and I dragged him afterwards to the best racially-integrated dance club event of the week in DC at the Lizard Lounge. He has to take part in a debate today, and I did my best to get him a hangover. But he’s a vegetarian teetotaller – so what are you gonna do?
THE ULTIMATE CONFLICT OF INTEREST: Kinsley fesses up about how his Parkinson’s disease inevitably affects his view of therapeutic cloning. I feel the same way about HIV and drug research. Of course I don’t want the government crippling pharmaceutical profits, because it will slow such research and mean I’ll probably die a few years sooner than might otherwise occur. Does this mean that because I’m HIV-positive, my view should be airily dismissed as too biased? I agree with Mike that this would be a bizarre inference. But the more interesting issue, of course, is whether Kinsley could have written this column with no conflict of interest before he had gone public with Parkinsons. I think that not disclosing such an obviously important piece of background material would have compromised the integrity of such a column. But I still believe that the right to privacy – especially about medical matters – would have and should have trumped that conflict of interest as a factor in ethical journalism. That’s because I believe in a pretty solid right to privacy. What I’d like to know from so many in the media who do not respect such a right is the answer to the following question: would they feel entitled to ‘out’ someone’s medical history in the event of such a column being written by someone who has kept their disease private? And if not, why not?
ANOTHER BROCK LIE? Did David Brock also partially fabricate his student journalism experience at Berkeley? A fellow student at the time, who worked with Brock in college journalism, thinks Brock did. At this point, to whom would you give the benefit of the doubt?
IN RETROSPECT: Fascinating data from Gallup on how people retroactively view various presidents. To my mind, the most interesting comparison is between the first president Bush and his successor, Bill Clinton. Clinton has the highest negatives (47) since Kennedy and the smallest net positive rating (+4), apart from Nixon. President GHW Bush gets a 69 percent approval rating, with a net positive of + 43. In general, I think the first Bush is a deeply under-estimated president. But the collapse in Clinton’s ratings is, I think, due to two basic things: the pardons and September 11. People have absorbed just how little he did, weighed against the gravity of the growing terrorist threat during his eight years in office. They get it. And, for all Joe Klein’s and David Brock’s spin control, they always will.
HOW CHURCHES DIE: Of all the material printed in the last few weeks on the current crisis in the American Catholic church, yesterday’s New York Times story on the near-collapse of the Irish church struck me as one of the more significant. What the story shows is that a combination of factors – modern, secular life, greater freedom for women, more awareness of homosexuals, economic success and growth – can hollow out traditional deference to church authority. Sex scandals – especially when they appear to be endemic and covered up – can deliver the coup de grace. It is perfectly possible that in the next few years, in the absence of radical reform, the Catholic church in America will become a rump of its former self. Perhaps among those communities that are as yet less touched by modernizing influences, such as the Latino immigrant population, the orthodox Church will endure. But what Ireland shows – and what the rapid spread of fundamentalist Protestantism in Latin America shows – is that even traditional cultures can suddenly abandon unthinking and unswerving obedience to a clerisy widely perceived as corrupt or psychologically warped. It will happen here. Rome won’t prevent it. And if American Catholics refuse to see their church go into radical decline, they will have to move toward some kind of schism to save it.
The Dish 