After almost two years of regular writing with only a few scattered weeks off here and there, I’m going to take the rest of August off the blog. I have a couple of pieces to write and much headspace to clear. But fear not: the Dish will be back with bells on after Labor Day. If disaster strikes, of course, I’ll be back. And I’ll occasionally post bits and pieces as well as my regular columns – and the next installment of the Paglia interview. But as most of you know, there’s now a vast and diverse blogosphere out there to read. So enjoy. And see you in September.
… BUT BEFORE I GO: So far as I can see, there’s nothing much new in Michael Elliott’s Time magazine piece on the Clinton-Bush transition and al Qaeda. After eight years of bungling and negligence, the Clinton administration had finally come up with a batch of proposals to tackle al Qaeda. But it was too late for them to do anything themselves. These proposals were forwarded to Bush officials who incorporated some but ratcheted up others for a plan to “eliminate” al Qaeda, formulated by September 4. The only relevant issue seems to me to be whether the new administration miscalculated the urgency of such a task. I don’t think there’s any doubt they did. On the other hand, the Clintonites had had eightyears to get al Qaeda and had only made the problem worse. So who deserves the most blame – an administration that took eight years to do an insufficient amount or an administration that failed to act urgently enough in its first eight months? I’d say both deserve criticism but the Clintonites deserve the largest part, since they were primarily responsible for letting the problem get so dangerous in the first place. It says something about the brilliance of Sandy Berger’s spin operation that he was able to get this piece presented the way it has been. And a sign of the currently anti-Bush movement in the media that it has gotten such swift attention.
… AND ANOTHER THING: One of the many joys of this website are the emails I get from people telling me stories about their lives, or sharing experiences that I would never otherwise have come across. I can’t publish them all – and most are private. But here’s one that cheered me up. It tackles the issue of the integration of gay and straight people – and how such integration can inform and deepen everyone involved. So before I fade out for an August vacation, here’s an email worth sharing:
Your point recently about the value of gays and straights mixing made me want to write to you about my friends Karen and Jean, a gay couple whose “camp” (as they call lake houses up there) on Clary Lake in Maine is in a family neighborhood. I really enjoyed Karen’s interactions with her neighbors. She watched people’s houses when they were gone and fed their cats. She looked out for the oldest fellow in the neighborhood, helping him with his lawn and fixing things that needed mending around the house. She welcomed the geeky young man, Brian, who didn’t seem to get much respect from his young peers, letting him hang out at their place, go out in the boats, etc, and she took special pleasure that on his birthday one year she taught him to waterski, and when they took a turn past the house, he was standing up on his skis like a pro, impressing all the other kids (and adults) who were watching him. Jean’s beautiful garden is the envy of the neighborhood, and she shares her raspberries with the folks in the neighborhood just as they share their bounty of, say, zucchini. In every way, Karen and Jean were model neighbors, and they were a heck of a lot of fun to be around.
Last summer we were in the lake cooling off, Karen and I chatting with her neighbor Jeneen, a sixty-something straight lady whose “camp” is next door. Karen mentioned to Jeneen that they were going to be in Florida that winter, near when Jeneen and her husband Flash spend the winter, and perhaps they could get together. Then she turned to me and said, “We found a nice resort down there that caters to lesbians!” Without missing a beat, Jeneen piped up, “Why, isn’t that nice!” This vignette really stuck with me. Karen’s sexuality wasn’t an embarrassing secret or something to be glossed over. These neighbors really did accept her for who she was, enough to be happy for her about what truly made her happy.
Unfortunately, this story does not have a happy ending. Karen died this past spring. Every one of her lake neighbors was at the funeral.
CATHOLIC AND ANTI-CATHOLIC: “Wills is so right that there is something simply bizarre about a church committing suicide because there can be no compromise over such a minor, administrative matter as priestly celibacy, while the vast majority of its faithful disagree on nothing substantive in its actual creed. This is a skewing of priorities which is in itself a function of a doctrine of papal authority gone bad. And one of the oddest things about the most ferociously orthodox of today’s Catholics is how close they are to the view of many ignorant non-Catholics: that the church is (in historian Paul Johnson’s words) “a divine autocracy,” that the pope is the infallible dictator, that he cannot err, that unthinking obedience and silence is the correct posture of any believing Catholic, that disagreeing on minor matters is indistinguishable from differing on major issues and so on. This is not merely philistine and anti-intellectual. Properly speaking, as Wills powerfully argues, it is anti-Catholic…” From my new review of Garry Wills’ “Why I Am A Catholic,” posted opposite.
The Dish 