Tom Friedman says the administration should cool it on warnings of a future attack. I fear he’s too blithe about the risks. But he cannot blame the Bush administration for now doing what the press has hounded them for not doing in the past. How can they win? If they don’t sound the alarm, they have Maureen Dowd accusing them of being on vacation. If they do, Tom Friedman tells them to cool it and Tim Noah suggests they’re faking it. They can’t win. Which, of course, is what the Bush-haters in the press, still seething at the president’s sustained popularity, have intended all along. I say: give them what they want. Scare the bejeezus out of MoDo. Day after day after day.
NOT JUST IN AMERICA: Another pedophile priest in England. This one, mercifully, didn’t physically harm any children.
AND I THOUGHT I WAS TOUCHY: A reader writes: “Skinny pouty faced kiddies with teen angst written all over their faces in $3,000 business suits as featured in men’s magazines have amused and irritated me for years. I’ve simply refused to do business with any company that presents its products in that way. I don’t buy or wear children’s clothing. Circumventing that whole load of crap, I’ve had my suits, shirts, ties, etc. made to order for years. Is the fashion industry wising up? We’ll see.” Now tell us how you really feel …
INSTAPUNDIT REVAMPED: This guy frightens me. He should frighten you all.
FORGET GAY MARRIAGE: Dave Barry has discovered a threat to the marital order that National Review has somehow missed: teachers and cops.
ERIC COME LATELY: For many months, Eric Alterman referred to weblogs as “vanity websites.” The he trashed the concept. Then he sharpened his criticism to say he loves weblogs, he just can’t stand mine, with all its narcissistic (code-word for gay) preening, and so on. He just can’t tolerate the idea of someone in a free country occasionally writing about his actual life, as well as public matters of comment and interest. But now, lo and behold, lovable Eric has decided to get his own blog. Imitation and all that. And the comrades at “Tapped,” the only readable product to come out of the American Prospect, have welcomed their brother-in-arms to the fray. I welcome him too, vanity and all.
DU BOIS AND THE GAY PREDICAMENT: A reader sends the following quotation from W.E.B. Du Bois in “The Souls of Black Folk,” that casts a shadow over the difficult emergence of gay men and women into the sunlight of actual visibility and formal equality. DuBois noticed how quickly others saw the problems of newly liberated African-Americans not as functions of their terrible experience of slavery and oppression but as proof of their inferiority, the threat they posed to marriage, to the military, to civilized society. I quote:
“[The Negro] felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance,–not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systemic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.
A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but
rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the “higher” against the “lower” races…
But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came borne upon the four winds: Lo! we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,–and behold the suicide of a race!
The analogy is inexact. Homosexual Americans have not endured physical slavery and the obscene repression once meted out to African-Americans. But they have endured a slavery of the heart, an expunction of the deepest longings of their souls, the constant scrutiny of those always looking to find fault and never dignity, and the knowledge of their own failures, which can, if unaddressed, lead to a collapse of self-confidence and self-esteem. That’s why it is important not to acquiesce in the scape-goating of the moment, but to resist it, overcome it, and prove it wrong.
The Dish 