Month: April 2002

Norah Vincent knows why Alex Beam and Eric Alterman hate bloggers. It’s called real diversity.

Spinsanity, who nit-picked me for what they regarded as a misleading implication, have the real goods on Michael Moore. You wouldn’t believe what he makes up. Well, maybe you would. Okay, Brendan. You win the even-handedness award. What’s the betting that left-wing media hound Jim Romenesko won’t link?

The Amazon reviewer sums up our latest book club pick thus: “While I don’t claim that everything [Bjorn] Lomborg says [in “The Skeptical Environmentalist”] makes perfect sense, or that all his data are correct (surely he won’t deny his readers the right to apply skepticism to his own claims as well, and it is quite easy to use the WWW to check out his opponents’ arguments), this is a rare book that attempts seriously to consider all facts from a variety of angles, which tries to answer objections or qualifications from opponents, and which carefully connects all the variables into a global picture, incorporating the temporal dimension both past and future. Lomborg is truly skeptical, in the sense of taking nothing for granted and approaching all the issues dispassionately. These are, as Descartes told us in his Discourse on the Method, some of the conditions for true knowledge. Reading Lomborg one sometimes feels like the light has been turned on or the mists have cleared on many topics.” So let’s turn the light on in the environmental debate. You have until May 6 to read the book before the discussion starts. Lomborg will take part; we’ll link to sites critical of his work, and those supportive. If you want to get to the bottom of the environmental debate, this is your chance. Buy the book here, support the site, and feed your mind.

THE ASSAULT ON THE JEWS: Don’t miss this riveting and moving diarist from Jerusalem by Yossi Klein Halevi in The New Republic. It describes in searing language what this second Intifada has done – is doing – to the promise that the Jews could one day have a home. He writes:

The fear has not only forced us into our homes; it has locked us out of our national, communal space. In our dread of public places, notes Israeli journalist Ari Shavit, lies a threat to our collective identity. Striking at a seder–which celebrates the founding of the Jewish people–is an unbearable symbol of the war against the Jewish collective. We are in the grip of an experiment testing how long a society can endure under relentless terrorism before it begins to disintegrate. If the experiment continues unchecked, we will become a completely atomized society–or no longer a society at all. A state founded on the survival instinct of the Jewish people risks devolving into the survival instinct of the individual Jew. Rather than see Israel as the answer to Jewish survival, we are beginning to see it as a threat.

That is why this terrorism must be defeated. It is also why we must not equivocate in defending the last refuge for the Jewish people to live in peace and freedom as a collective nation. Israel, like all states, is not perfect. Its treatment of many Palestinians has been cruel and wrong. The settlements policy is, to my mind, a foolish provocation. But I hope I can recognize in my own generation a moment when an attack upon the Jews is yet again an attack upon civilization itself. We are at another such pivotal moment. And the same forces – from Europe and the Vatican – are counseling moral equivalence. But there is no moral equivalence between a free country protecting itself from terror – and a terrorist organization, exploiting the misery of millions in order to foment nothing – nothing – but more violence. And make no mistake, Arafat’s only historic achievement is the perpetuation of violence and subsequently his own thugocracy. Halevi comments acidly on those who sympathize with Israel but who still counsel that fighting back is not a solution. Oh yes it is:

In one sense, it hardly matters that this military operation won’t stop the suicide bombers. (Indeed, nothing short of destroying the terrorist infrastructure known as the Palestinian Authority is likely to contain the terrorist assault.) In this war for the survival of our public spaces, reaffirmation of our collective identity is itself a victory. The Zionist revolution has long since forfeited its ideal of the Jewish worker and the Jewish farmer; now, it is the Jewish fighter whose existence is in the balance.

May he fight. And may we go on to fight with him against the same dark forces that lurk just over the horizon – in Tehran and Baghdad.

SHE’S STILL HERE: Rumors of Margaret Thatcher’s retreat from public life turn out to be somewhat exaggerated. She can do a mean book-signing.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE? This time, a poem.
UPDATE:Hang on a minute. Several of you think the poem might actually mean the reverse of the meaning I first ascribed to it. Reading it again, I think you could well be right, although, like many poems, its meaning is not literal and so open to more than one interpretation. Here’s a reader comment on the poem’s possible meaning:

In fact, there’s more evidence to suggest that the curse is directed at the high-jackers. The repetition of the word “rectitude” supports this interpretation. The poem attacks and inverts the “rectitude” of fanatics who slaughter in the name of religion. The power of the poem’s curse (the power of the poem, really) arises from its envisaging the fundamentalists’ being infiltrated, suffused, and possessed by the spirit of their victims. It is this spirit which the terrorist has either sought to negate or never acknowledged. The poem concludes then with two moves: first the power of imagination is figured as a means of vengeance to be used _against_ the terrorists; second, the perverted quality of the terrorists’ “rectitude” is implicitly demonstrated to stem from a deficient power of imagination, from a failure to grasp the “secret of morals, the imagination to enter the skin of another.” It’s this imaginative entering of the skin of another that the fundamentalist mind cannot perform, and thus the appropriate punishment for a fundamentalist terrorist is to have this failure of imagination (and thus morality) turned against him in the afterlife, as he loses his own essential or “fundamental” being and becomes fraught by the beings and essences of his victims. Part of the strength of the poem and a chief attribute of its seriousness of purpose lie in its understanding of how imagination at its best is the condition of possibility for morality and mutual understanding; but in times of moral extremity, such as these months after 9/11, imagination must be transformed into an agency of vengeance and then of justice. The poetic principle here is similar to that of the contrapasso in Dante. This assumes that there’s a direct referent for the poem’s curse, and that the poem is about something concrete. Op-eds and public policy essays must have direct referents, and should be about something concrete. But certainly we shouldn’t demand that all poems meet these stipulations. If I’m wrong about this poem, and you’re right, then I’m distraught. The poem, in such a case, would be utterly vile, far more so than Sontag’s claim about the courageousness of the terrorists.

Okay. I guess this is a classic lesson in how poetry is far more ineffable than prose. See what you think. And thanks for alerting me.

CORRECTION: Rod Dreher’s approving quote of a Vatican source describing the Patriarch of Jerusalem as giving a “false, lyi
ng, asinine statement” did not refer to the Orthodox Patriarch but the Latin Patriarch, of the Roman Catholic Church. My mistake. But it actually makes my point more forcefully. Imagine if a gay dissident had described a church official as making a “false, lying, asinine statement.” Somehow I think there would be more disapproval of cafeteria Catholicism from some quarters. Dreher subsequently argues that differing with Rome on politics is not the same as differing with it on morals. Well, if the war against terror isn’t a matter of morality, I don’t know what is. And if the death penalty isn’t also a matter of morals, I don’t know what is. But if your Catholic cafeteria is on the right, and you back Israel and capital punishment, no-one seems to care. Here’s my concession: I won’t call Dreher a “Catholic hobbyist” for picking and choosing what he agrees with the Pope about. I’ll call him a man with a brain and a conscience.

GIVE THE GUY CREDIT FOR CHUTZPAH: Here’s an amazing, splutter-over-your-coffee quote, in the New York Times today:

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, told a conference at the University of Oklahoma today that he was frustrated that the Israelis had spurned the Arab peace offer, a plan the administration gave its support. “We’re offering the Israelis full, total peace and security in return for ending the military occupation,” he said. “You still have the Arab leadership ready to stick its neck out and say, yes, let’s have peace,” he added. But he warned of dire consequences if the situation remains unchanged. “I cannot guarantee this down the road, when everybody becomes a suicidal bomber.”

So this guy, who represents a country which has financed Islamo-fascism, gave us the citizens who killed over 3000 people in New York City, now threatens that there will be more suicide bombers, if Israel doesn’t capitulate to terror. And he claims that he and the dictatorship he represents were “sticking their necks out” to offer Israel a plan that would effectively destroy that country’s security. Are we on the same planet or what?

EPHEBOPHILIA IN VERSE: Reading some errant poems last night, I stumbled across one I’d long forgotten, that seemed apposite to our current discourse on the evil of lusting after the young. It’s called “Senex” by John Betjeman, a wonderful and under-rated English poet of the twentieth century.

Oh would I could subdue the flesh
Which sadly troubles me!
And then perhaps could view the flesh
As though I never knew the flesh
And merry misery.

To see the golden hiking girl
With wind about her hair,
The tennis playing, biking girl,
The wholly-to-my-liking girl,
To see and not to care.

I’m not sure I can reproduce the whole poem without copyright permission so I’ll stop there. Except for this wonderful metaphor:

Get down from me! I thunder there,
You spaniels! Shut your jaws!
Your teeth are stuffed with underwear,
Suspenders torn asunder there
And buttocks in your paws!

No I’m not approving of this. But it’s one of the best expressions of the ephebophile temptation I know of. At once empathetic and horrified. Easier said in poetry than prose, perhaps.

HITCH ON THE QUEEN MUM: I don’t agree with all of the caustic comments my friend Christopher Hitchens makes in this Guardian piece. But it has some great moments. Here’s one:

Not even Wyatt of Weeford disputed the essential facts in A N Wilson’s account of a dinner party that he, Wyatt, had given for the old girl. As the martinis and fine wines took hold, she reminisced about a poetry reading held at Windsor Castle in the old King’s day, when Edith and Osbert Sitwell had been present, and also an enigmatic other: “This rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem … I think it was called The Desert. At first the girls got the giggles and then I did and then even the King … Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank.” Of course the author of The Waste Land did work in a bank, and was somewhat depressing, but some of us who have our quarrels with Mr Eliot might regard this episode as a poor return for his lifelong monarchism and anglophilia.

Gay people are supposed to shut up, utter no dissent, keep their heads down or be regarded as bad Catholics. Rod Dreher can lambaste the Pope John Paul II on his anti-Israel rhetoric, quote a Vatican source describing the Orthodox Patriarch as giving a “false, lying, asinine statement,” and no-one bats an eye-lid. More double-standards from the Catholic theocons. Many of them disagree with the Pope on such major issues as the death penalty, the morality of capitalism, and the right of Israel to self-defense, but if someone else dares to dissent on sexual matters, they’re written out of the church. I’m not saying that Rod isn’t entitled to his heterodox views. I share some, if not all, of them. I just wish he would allow others to be entitled to theirs’.

Here’s an excellent recent review of Bjorn Lomborg’s book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” which is our book club choice this month. Check it out – and join the debate soon!

Yet another piece of evidence from Michael Moore himself that the notion that his book was published and unalterable by September 11 is simply untrue. Here’s a recent account of his own description of the process of publishing his book. Of course, Moore argues that he was resisting “censorship” by refusing to tone down his book or add any commentary on September 11. But even taking him at his word, this merely proves that it was ultimately his choice – albeit a tough one. It is not true that there was no possibility of amending the book after September 11. As to my hedging with the word “barely,” I know better than to state flat-out from one reading of a book that there is no mention of the war at all. Proving a negative is always hard. I might have missed something. Can you imagine if I had said there was no mention and he’d added something I missed. Romenesko would have linked within five seconds. I confess that in some of the chapters, I skimmed through some of Moore’s rants. You try reading this sub-literate screed word by word. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t factually wrong. I wasn’t. But the left-wing jihad continues.

“Oh no, even Andrew Sullivan has gone Queen Mum crazy. What’s all your guff about her and WWII supposed to mean? Without being cruel or disrespectful or even, perish the thought, mildly republican, you should make some reference to the facts about Queen Elizabeth and fascism.” – this and backlash from the left, all on the just-updated Letters Page.

I’ve been taken to task by Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity (a supporter and former sponsor of Michael Moore’s) and gay left media guru, Jim Romenesko, for apparently making a small error in my recent Sunday Times piece about Michael Moore’s screed, “Stupid White Men.” I’m accused of being sloppy. Here’s what I wrote:

There is also barely a mention in Moore’s book about the current war on terrorism. You can understand why. It raises questions the left simply doesn’t want to answer. Was the American intervention in Afghanistan, which many leftists opposed, a liberating mission after all? How can leftists bemoan the removal of a viciously oppressive, sexist, homophobic tyranny?

So far, no factual errors. The defenders of Moore say that his book went to press before September 11 and therefore this criticism is redundant. Huh? Here’s a piece from Salon in January that shows that Moore could have changed the book if he wanted to, that the publishers wanted him to, but he refused:

Moore’s new book, “Stupid White Men and Other Excuses for the State of the Nation,” which pointedly criticizes President George W. Bush and his administration, was due in stores on Oct. 2. As with many books scheduled for release in the weeks that immediately followed Sept. 11, plans to ship the title to stores were put on hold. According to HarperCollins, “both Moore and [Judith Regan’s HarperCollins imprint] ReganBooks thought its publication would be insensitive, given the events of September 11.” By mid-October, there were 50,000 finished books (out of an announced first printing of 100,000) collecting a month’s worth of dust in a Scranton, Pa., warehouse, and ReganBooks had yet to schedule a new release date for “Stupid White Men.” It was holding off in hopes that Moore would include new material to address the recent events, and would change the title and cover art. Moore says he readily agreed to these requests. But once HarperCollins had his consent, it asked Moore to rewrite sections — up to 50 percent of the book — that it deemed politically offensive given the current climate. In addition, the Rupert Murdoch-owned publishing house wanted Moore to help defray half the cost of destroying the old copies and of producing the new edition, by contributing $100,000 from his royalty account. Moore was aghast. “They wanted me to censor myself and then pay for the right to censor myself,” he declared. “I’m not going to do that!” After close to three months of relentless negotiations that threatened to embarrass one of the country’s leading publishing houses, the potentially explosive drama was suddenly resolved when HarperCollins announced on Dec. 18 its plans to publish “Stupid White Men” as is, slating the title for early March 2002.

You can understand why Moore didn’t want to do this. I think he was probably right to hold onto his unique brand of bitter vituperation. And it was unfair for the publishing house to demand that he make a financial sacrifice for a news event he had no control over. But it’s simply not true that the book was already published by September 11 and that no changes were in any way possible. Of course, changes were possible. It was also possible that Moore could have amended the book to further excoriate Bush’s handling of the war. But he didn’t. My sentences: “There is also barely a mention in Moore’s book about the current war on terrorism. You can understand why,” therefore stand up. I can understand why Jim Romenesko, who has a gay-left agenda, and Brendan Nyhan, who also has an agenda, would want to skew this matter. But there were no factual inaccuracies in my article. And they should retract their assertion that there were. (P.S. A simple test of whether Romenesko has any fairness in this matter will be shown if he links to this post to rebut his featuring Nyhan’s piece. We’ll see, won’t we?)

“Mr. Rove polls for the magic-button phrases and rationales that will persuade the middle class to help the rich get richer and build a mandate for smog from sea to oil-slicked sea.” – Maureen Dowd, New York Times, today.

TIRED OF THE MEDIA SPIN ON ISRAEL? Check out the blogger alternative – in real time.

This month’s book club selection is Bjorn Lomborg’s “The Skeptical Environmentalist.” It’s not brand new. But it fulfills all the requirements for our book club. It’s provocative; it’s scholarly and meticulously researched; it tackles a burning public issue; and it helps break down some of the more hackneyed right-left debates. Lomborg is a Green; he believes passionately, as I do, in protecting the health of our planet. But he’s also got a brain and he’s skeptical of some of the more outlandish and pessimistic claims of the Green movement. He began his book attempting to refute professor Julian Simon’s work debunking the notion that the earth’s environment is getting worse. To Lomborg’s amazement, he couldn’t refute it. He’s a statistician by training and found that the stats simply didn’t correlate with deep environmental pessimism. This book is the result of his subsequent research. He’s been attacked – sometimes physically – by the old Green guard. He has been pilloried by other environmentalist scientists. He has been cut off from his old allies. And yet he has found some unlikely fans in the reviewers in the mainstream press and from magazines like the Economist. In any event, it’s a book I’ve long meant to buy and read. So why not join in and read alongside me and other andrewsullivan.com readers? Bjorn has agreed to participate – and we’ll also be linking to sites critical and supportive of his work. The only difference is that this is a longer book than our first two – over 400 pages. But it’s such a ground-breaking and stimulating book that I didn’t think that should bar it from being part of our online experiment in book reading and debate. For that reason, we’ll take a full month to read it and start the discussion May 6. So don’t delay. To join the debate for this month, click here to get the book. It promises to be an education and a political stimulant.

CNN PUFFS MOORE: Here’s the most egregiously celebratory puff-piece on the embittered leftist, Michael Moore – from CNN, natch. The prose is priceless: “If some leaders had their way, Moore might be brought up on charges of treason for his critical remarks about the conservative agenda and the Bush administration,” CNN argues. Which leaders, exactly? Then there’s CNN’s attempt at balance in visiting a Moore book-signing:

“He’s wonderful,” said Traverse City Mayor Margaret Dodd. “He cares about the things America is supposed to care about, and he has the courage to do something.” Erin Chamberlain, an organizer of the newly formed campus Green Party, said Moore was a role model. Shannon Hemingway, a volunteer with the college radio station, praised him for presenting complex issues in simple terms. “He’s genuine,” Hemingway said.

Remember that this book has chapters called “Kill Whitey,” and “Idiot Nation.” It argues that president Bush is the beneficiary of a coup. In case you haven’t got the message that Moore is a vital dissenter, brave and true, opposed only by the crazy far right, there’s a puffy book review as well. Let’s say there’s a similar figure on the far right. How about Patrick Buchanan? Or even, say, Ann Coulter? Can you imagine in a million years a similar soft-lens approach being meted out to him or her? Walter, you’ve still got some work to do.

ANOTHER WONDERFUL CATHOLIC BLOGGER: Check this guy out. He calls his blog Sursum Corda.

HOME NEWS: Great news, actually. Traffic last month was 805,000 visits, from 210,000 separate web addresses. And my e-partner Robert just did the accounting, and discovered that we went into a clear debt-free profit in January and that the profit has now risen steadily each month. It’s only a few grand – but hey, it’s something! All because of the book club and your generosity. Another way of looking at this is that this form of Internet journalism went into profit within 18 months. If we stay completely still, and don’t grow at all, I will be able to pay myself a salary more than comparable to my salary at The New Republic. It won’t make me rich, but it sure will pay the rent and then some. This is your achievement, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it’s a small milestone in e-journalism. We may not have made much yet – but this site has now made more profit than Slate and Salon combined. Thanks again – and please keep this success growing. You’ve proved the nay-sayers wrong. Which is why the anti-blog backlash from the established media is now underway. Methinks they’re a little rattled. As well they might be.

OUR GAY CHURCH: I guess I should make it clear, after much discussion on this site and elsewhere, that I am in no way trying to deny that a large majority of the Church’s sexual abuse cases appear to be same-sex in nature; or, for that matter, that most seem to be with post-pubescent youngsters rather than children (which makes the offense less awful, to my mind, but still reprehensible). The difference I have with the likes of Rod Dreher is that I do not believe that this makes it a homosexual problem. It is an abuse problem. Repeatedly describing it as a gay problem unfairly smears the many good gay priests who manage to perform their duties without sexual abuse.

THE SHOE DROPS: But if you read the anti-gay Church conservatives closely, you also realize one amazing thing. They have all but conceded that their beloved Church – in one of the most conservative eras under John Paul II – is predominantly a gay-run institution, at least in America. And since the numbers will tell you that only a small minority of these gay priests have committed sexual abuse, the conclusion surely is that the Church in America relies now to an extraordinary extent on gay priests. Gratitude? Don’t count on it. Sympathy? You’ve got to be kidding. These gay priests are lucky not to be exposed and kicked out – let alone thanked. The sneering tone adopted by some toward these indispensable stewards of the faith shows how deep their contempt for gay men truly is. It also acts as a means to resist the obvious implications of all this.

THE PLIGHT OF GOOD GAY PRIESTS: Think about it for a minute. What gay priests have to do is serve a church that also says that their fellow gays are “intrinsically disordered,” that any attempt by gay men and women to have sex or intimacy or committed relationships is simply a capitulation to evil, that society is justified in permitting discrimination in housing, employment and all manner of occupations to gay people, and that even violence against gays can be understood (if not condoned) in some contexts as a result of gays pushing their agenda too far. Now imagine what that does to the souls and minds and spiritual health of many gay priests. It eats them up. They know this demeaning attitude toward gay people is corrosive of the church and destructive of their own vocations. This internal psychic stress surely has something to do with the small minority who break down and do what actually are ‘evil’ things. But if there is no difference, from the point of view of the church, between the evil of gay intimacy and the evil of sexual abuse, is it any wonder that some conflicted souls act upon that assertion? Or that some get los
t in spiritual, sexual and ethical confusion? This doesn’t excuse their sins and crimes. But the psychological torture wrought upon gay Catholics by their own Church’s doctrines reaches its cruelest peak when applied to gay Catholic priests. It would be nice if some Catholic conservatives, even if they insist that gays in the clergy and laity must be condemned to the martyrdom of loneliness and sexlessness that the Church believes is the only authentic homosexual vocation, acknowledged that this is a very hard cross to bear. It would be even nicer if these conservatives were then able to thank these brave and conflicted souls, who not only bear the deep burden of deep emotional and ethical conflict but have kept their church alive when others haven’t. But I won’t hold my breath.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “If we reasoned better about war, there could be less of it. An example of bad reasoning is the conventional premise that an adversary who targets innocent civilians is too evil to be worthy of a hearing and a negotiated peace. The goal of less war and less terrorism would be helped by reasoning about what causes terrorists to become terrorists, what their goals are, and whether their goals could fit into a mutually beneficial peace settlement. This essay will make four points about the killing of innocent civilians:
One, the conventional belief that civilians in a democracy are innocent is false.
Two, the rule of war that civilians are not to be targets of military violence is inconsistent.
Three, the rule of war that civilians are not to be targets of military violence is counterproductive.
Four, this inconsistent rule of war is counterproductive because it is used to demonize the enemy and increase the emotions for war.” – Clark Rieke, defending terrorism, on the clarifying anti-war left site, Nonviolence.org. By non-violence, they mean no response to terrorist violence. I think.

WHEN WHITE KIDS RIOT: It’s somehow a sporting tradition, especially after the universally approved NCAA championship. When black kids do it, it’s crime. Michelle Cottle has a point, methinks.

AN AMERICAN PROBLEM?: An Irish bishop has just quit because of the way he handled sex abuse cases in the past. He’ll be headed to Rome this week to finalize his departure. This follows a similar incident in Poland. But this is a minor matter of interest only to those “pansexual” Americans. Yeah, right.

BEING FAIR TO MOORE: Several of you have alerted me to the fact that I was wrong to criticize Michael Moore for not mentioning the war on terror in his latest screed. The book apparently went to press on September 10 and therefore couldn’t be changed. I’m sorry I missed this fact. Nevertheless, it still strikes me as somewhat unconvincing. If Moore had wanted to address the issue, HarperCollins could easily have adjusted its press run, added an extra chapter, or some such exigency. They had several months to make changes. But hey, I should have noted the press run issue in the piece. My apologies for that.