An exhausting six and a half hour technical run-through of the play tonight has me writing here at 3am. Basically, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I guess these kinds of things happen in the theater all the time. I must have blocked all those experiences from my brain. But my favorite moment tonight came when I tried something new in a scene with my silk cravatte (hey, I’d never wear one in real life). For the play, I’ve shaved completely so I can add (with toupee glue) a thick and somewhat Starbucks employee-like go-tee for the first act. (I have to shave it off as a plot twist in the second.) Anyway, my acrobatics with the scarf managed to remove the beard prematurely, and for most of the scene, it was floating around the set like a small rodent searching for a home. Eventually, I tracked it down and stuck it back on. Better glue next time.
MORE BROCK LIES: David Horowitz writes a devastating account of yet more David Brock lies in the current FrontPage magazine. This particular lie is relevant because it targets the very moral integrity of Horowitz. Brock claims in his book that Horowitz, despite public hostility to anti-gay prejudice, was in fact a secret homophobe, uttering anti-gay slurs in private. Horowitz denies it; and quotes the only source he can think of denying it as well. I’m not surprised by this latest revelation. For the gist of this incident is central to the point of Brock’s book, which is to do all he can to corral gay men and women back into Democratic Party ranks where such luminaries as Sid Blumenthal and Bob Shrum think we all belong. In fact, it’s hard to under-estimate how much some on the left despise the idea of gay men and women leaving the Democratic plantation. They refuse to believe that some of us may actually support some (but by no means all) Republicans (as well as some Democrats) because we actually believe in the principles of small government, a free society, market economics, and a strong defense. So we must either be completely screwed-up hypocrites and closet-cases; or we must be simply oblivious to the pathological hatred of gays that exists among all Republicans.
THE DEMOCRATIC PLANTATION: So when a gay-tolerant Republican/conservative heterosexual emerges, it’s imperative he or she be exposed as a secret hater. And when a non-leftist gay writer, thinker or politician emerges, he or she must be exposed as a hypocrite or nut-case or slut or some mixture of the above. (Never mind that every homophobic trope is deployed by the left in this fashion. If it’s in defense of the left, it can’t be bigotry!) What a few on the gay-left have tried to do to me for a decade – smear, expose, defame, marginalize, blackmail, etc. – they must also do to any gay-friendly hetero figures on the right. All of us threaten their monopoly on gay votes and loyalties. Hence the outing of my private life. Hence the smearing of Horowitz. All gay Republicans must be seen as hypocrites (even if they’re nothing of the sort) and all gay-tolerant Republicans must be exposed as simple phonies who secretly hate gays as passionately as Fred Phelps. The Democrats are terrified of dissent and debate in this area, as much as they are on race, since without these monolithic special interest group blocs, they can’t get anywhere near a majority. So any deviation from party loyalty is immediately punished as “Uncle Tom” behavior, and the more influential you are, the worse the smears. (Clarence Thomas gets the all-time prize for this.) I understand why some gay non-leftists, who poke their heads above the parapet for a while, crack under this pressure. There are few on the right who genuinely support our positions and provide emotional support, even if there are fewer outright homophobes among them than some would have you believe. I can even understand why some – Brock being first among them – would give up the fight and choose the easier path of defecting to the warm embrace of Frank Rich, Sid Blumenthal, and the like. I wouldn’t wish this kind of psychological pressure on anyone, and, in some ways, I sympathize with some of the stress Brock must have found himself coping with over the years. But the truth is: that doesn’t excuse his lies, smears, and distortions. The world is more complicated than he and his fellow partisans want it to be. What I and others have been trying to do for years is not smear gay Democrats – many of them have a principled and highly plausible politics – but to insist that alternatives are conceivable, and even beneficial in as much as they increase the ideological space for all gay people to maneuver in. Some leftists appreciate this and respect those who disagree with them – even enjoying the diversity of debate (I think of people like Urvashi Vaid or Paul Berman). Others – more partisan figures, or those who see politics as an arena for personal warfare more than political debate – simply want to shut this discussion down and engage in ugly smearing, ‘outing’, and defamation. Alas, this has always been what David Brock has been about. He once did it from the right. Now he’s doing it from the left. The only difference is that now that it suits the agenda of Rich, Blumenthal, Hertzberg et al, it, it’s more respectable in the mainstream media. But it isn’t. It’s still disgusting. As well as deeply, deeply sad.
THE END OF THE THIRD WAY: It was good while it lasted. Tony Blair promised to revamp socialism by never returning to tax-and-spend liberalism. He argued that a big, publicly-financed European-style welfare state could be compatible with American-style low taxes. Now he’s surrendered, as he always would. Gordon Brown, who is busy maneuvring to despatch Blair to history immediately after if not before the next election, this week unveiled a budget that will clobber British tax-payers with higher taxes in order to fund the 1940s behemoth called the National Health Service. Brown is also quietly playing to anti-Americanism in Labour Party ranks and watching gleefully as Blair’s attempt to support the war on terror meets a ferociously anti-Israel press and public. It’s no accident Brown’s speech was massaged by Bob Shrum. Neither Labour nor the Democrats have fundamentally changed their view that government knows best, that bigger government is better government, that terror should be appeased not opposed, and that higher taxes – not tax reductions – are the wave of the future. What this shows more deeply, I think, is that New Labour and the New Democrats were chimerae – designed as window dressing to get back to power after the rightward shift in the 1980s and 1990s. But underneath, nothing has changed. Look at Gore. His moderation in the 1980s and 1990s was a deliberate lie. He’s now liberated to say what he truly believes. It’s only a matter of time before Blair is sidelined and Britain’s Labour government echoes the Shrum-Greenberg-Brown-Gore line: pay your taxes, and do what you’re told.
EUROPE VERSUS THE JEWS, PART DEUX: “The question is whether the West will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel in its war against terror or whether it will side with terror against it. At present the signs are ominous. The leitmotiv of the state of Israel, forged after the world looked the other way from the Holocaust, is ‘never again’. The West has now given its response: ‘Yes, again’; and if they are destroyed, the Jews, as ever, will be to blame.” Don’t miss Melanie Phillips’ trenchant analysis of anti-Israel sentiment in Britain and Europe.
The Dish 