Not even an apology if people perceived it to be anti-gay, the usual formula for an embarrassed pol. Put this together with the gay groups’ insouciance, and you’ve just given Republicans carte blanche to gay-bait opponents at any opportunity. Still not a peep from the far-left National Gay Lesbian Task Force or from GLAAD, the gay thought-police. I just found a first edition of “Animal Farm.” Never felt more relevant.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: Worth passing along, I think:
Just a short note of thanks. Christopher Hitchens’ unswerving dedication to his conscience reinvigorated my own sense of purpose, long dormant through disillusionment. Thanks for honoring, if not the specifics of his stand, the courage he displayed in severing ties with The Nation. I served as a weapons specialist, of sorts, in the US Navy during Desert Storm/Shield. At the time, I truly believed in what we were doing; it seemed we could only be right. Then, as we returned to the States, and the post-deployment culture shock only further alienated us from our families and friends, we found, to our horror, that the war effort wasn’t so monolithically supported as we’d thought. We’d had no clue that, while we were fighting, and some of our friends were dying, others picketed and rallied against us. At least it seemed they were against us. It was our blood, wasn’t it? I first heard the phrase, “Blood for oil,” after I’d already served my time in the Gulf. And as attrition and time chipped away my certainty, I began to lose that spark of patriotism that had been my impetus for serving my country at all. The last three years of my six year enlistment were hell. I didn’t have anything to prop me up when things got hairy. America, and especially American politicians, just didn’t seem worth dying for. I didn’t want to bleed for oil anymore. I received my Honorable discharge in 1996. I’m sure my supervisors, not the same men who knew me during the Gulf War, breathed a deep sigh of relief and wrote me off as another one-hitch loser. Fine by me. I started a business. I raised a family. I stayed away from politics. Then came September, 11th 2001. Fanatical men shattered what small buffer of ignorant bliss I’d managed to maintain around myself and my family. Men no different than those we’d fought and beaten ten years earlier. And I once again felt I had to do something. I’m now in the hiring pools for both the Federal Air Marshal program and the Transportation Safety Administration’s Airport Security Screener. That’s my stand, and people like Hitchens remind me why I took it then, and why I do it now. Thanks.
GLENDA RESPONDS:
Dear Mr. Sullivan, I am delighted to accept the Sontag Award. I have disagreed with you since you were a boy wonder. In fact, I cancelled my subscription to The New Republic when you hijacked it, and I have watched your downwardly mobile career path with interest. Are you a U.S. citizen yet? Thank you for bringing a small part of my essay to a larger audience. Glenda Gilmore
Charming, isn’t she? Meanwhile, check out the website where her vacuous essay was first printed. Click on the link to the responses. They’re amazing. My favorite is as below:
Daily Dish Readers: Welcome to American Studies at Yale—check your brain at the door Posted at: 10/12/02 5:18:29 AM Posted by: HGS Dissident (as entered by poster)
What you have seen on display here in this article are the consequences of letting race-and-gender airheads infiltrate and then eventually take over a once a stellar department. Can you imagine what it is like for a graduate student like myself, who labored for seven years in a remote part of the world to learn a non-Indo-European language, to find himself under the thumb of parochial know-nothings like Glenda Gilmore? Yale History has unfortunately become the province of such America Studies apparatchiks and their partisan agendas. These so-called scholars are a profoundly petty, unworldly and intellectually average lot. Though they preen themselves with a fashionable thirdworldism, few if any have seriously ventured beyond the confines of comfy academic settings in America and Western Europe. They have risen to where they are by figuring out, way back during their undergraduate days, that honors and riches are available to those who can make themselves adept at uncovering yet more evidence confirming how our dastardly American society at one time in its past failed to live up to the standards of egaliltarian utopianism (that no society from time immemorial has ever lived up to these unrealizable ideals is not up for discussion…). This ongoing activity of unearthing fresh layers of American evil sets the boundaries of their intellectual universe. They are absolutely unable and unwilling to entertain the possibility that there have been or could be non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual perpetrators of violence and oppression.
When they are confronted with scholarship like my own, which concentrates on the imperial history of a non-Western power, their response is either knee-jerk moral equivalence which changes the topic to American crimes against underprivileged groups, or the contrivance of contorted causal chains which attempt to blame anything and everything that goes wrong in any part of the world on Washington or corporate America. They simply will not acknowledge that someone like Saddam or Bin Laden is possible. The only truly bad people on this planet are Christian Conservatives—and oil men. Gilmore’s article is the worst example I have seen yet of this moral and intellectual myopia at Yale.
The news is not all bad however. For the past several semesters I have worked as a teacher’s assistant and, what do you know, but the message is not taking. Most undergrads are savvy enough to have figured out that their profs are people who could not handle life in the real world—and they are simply waiting them out. It comes as a profound shock to these students when, after a few weeks in my section, they discover that I share their contempt for the naive, hyperbolic posturings of the faculty. The fact that Gilmore included in her piece a plea to Yalies to stand up to Bush shows how out of touch many professors are with the student body. Sorry, Glenda, but your students actually approve of the job the president is doing (wish I could say the same for your teaching….). They prefer his sober reckoning with geopolitical realities to your melodramatic verbage. The only way in which this situation resembles your vaunted sixties is that the young people are rebelling against authority—which at today’s Yale means rejecting the nihilistic rantings of tenured hyenas in favor of a level-headed appreciation of America’s security needs.
Get that person a blog!
A TASTE OF SADDAM: John Burns, a superb New York Times reporter, gets the run-around from Saddam:
But whatever Al Furat may be these days, the Iraqis certainly knew that the tour for at least 200 scrambling, sweating reporters would not settle the matter conclusively, and not just because none of the visitors were experts in nuclear physics. The tour left no time to visit all of the dozen or more buildings on the site, and no opportunity to descend into the underground bunkers that appeared to be accessible from steel-sided entranceways with rusting doorways that were dotted about. The result, mostly, was confusion and befuddlement – whether that was the intention of the tour’s organizers in the Ministry of Military Industrialization,
or an inevitability given the complexity of the issue and the chaotic circumstances. What was certain, however, was that tours like these for reporters are unlikely to add very much to the world’s knowledge of what Iraq’s secretive leadership has been up to.
And you think inspectors would fare much better?
DATA: Here are two stills from the ad for those of without internet connections. Judge for yourself. The reach for the guy’s crotch at the end of the ad is particularly subtle.
The Dish 