Sadly, it was mobbed. The hall was far too small to accommodate the crowds and many were turned away. I can’t believe NYU doesn’t have a larger hall than one that sits a couple hundred at most. But once it got under way, the event was great. Hitch was splendid – half after-dinner jokester, half passionate moralist. He made one point in particular that resonated. On the way there, we were confronted with protestors with “No War On Iraq” posters. Hitch noticed the Orwellian resonance of this slogan. The slogan, strictly speaking, is a lie, one of many promoted by the anti-war left and right. There is no possibility of a war with “Iraq.” Half the country – inhabited by the Kurds and Shia Muslims is already protected from Saddam’s murderous designs by British and American air-power. The remaining rump is not a country as such; it’s a population terrorized by a police state run by a sadistic maniac. We are not therefore at war with the country or people of Iraq; and by equating Saddam with Iraq, these so-called “peace-protestors” are de facto parties to his vile propaganda, the notion that Iraq is Saddam and Saddam is Iraq. That lie was recently displayed in the humiliating spectacle of grown human beings not simply being required to vote for Saddam, as Hitch observed, but actually to dance in the streets to celebrate him, to humiliate themselves out of terror. This disgusting spectacle wasn’t like “1984.” It was “1984.” And this is what the anti-war movement now finds itself defending. I watched part of the anti-war rally in DC on C-SPAN this weekend. Not a single speaker even addressed the evil in Baghdad. In their attempt to derail any attempt to disarm Saddam, and in their facile equation of Saddam with Iraq, they show the empty, bitter center of their alleged morality. (Check in later today for the first installment of my email chat with Hitch on his new book, “Why Orwell Matters,” on the Book Club page. We both hope you’ll join in as soon as you feel like it.)
MUST-READ: One of the books that first persuaded me I should write a book about the politics of homosexuality was Shelby Steele’s “The Content of Our Character.” He’s written much since, but I don’t think I’ve read anything of his as searingly beautiful and unflinching as his current piece in Harper’s. It’s amazing that it appears in that magazine, which has become a largely unread litany of bitter leftism under Lewis Lapham’s dyspeptic leadership. But Steele’s essay truly is a must-read. Steele shows brilliantly how the goal of black liberation – liberation toward an individuality unsullied by the poison of racism – has transformed itself into a humiliating attachment to black victimization and failure. The piece shocks the reader with its honesty. At one point, fo example, Steele recounts an exchange shown on C-SPAN between a black student and Ward Connerly at a Harvard debate. The student is withering toward Connerly’s anti-race preference message, and he is naturally supported by his peers and the Harvard establishment. This is Steele’s reflection on the young black student, insisting on the permanent oppression of his race:
[C]onsider what this Harvard student is called upon by his racial identity to argue in the year 2002. All that is creative and imaginative in him must be rallied to argue the essential weakness of his own people. Only their weakness justifies the racial preferences they receive decades after any trace of anti-black racism in college admissions. The young man must not show faith in the power of his people to overcome against any odds; he must show faith in their inability to overcome without help. As Mr. Connerly points to far less racism and far more freedom and opportunity for blacks, the young man must find a way, against all the mounting facts, to argue that black Americans cannot compete without preferences. If his own forebears seized freedom in a long and arduous struggle for civil rights, he must argue that his own generation is unable to compete on paper-and-pencil standadized tests.
Steele doesn’t mince words – because he sees how a powerful faction of liberalism, the central meaning of which should be about freedom, has become indistinguishable in some quarters from a reactionary and racist ideology that is the biggest obstacle to the advancement of African-American equality and progress today.
VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE: “An illuminating piece on [Paul] Wolfowitz, ‘The Sunshine Warrior’ by Bill Keller … gave a sympathetic view of [Wolfowitz’s] belief that the assertion of American power can turn Iraq into a democracy and help transform the entire Middle East. I was moved by his optimism, as I read, but I kept thinking of one thing: Vietnam. Here, as in Vietnam, the advocates are sure that American power can prevail – and sure that the result will be a happy one. But here, as in Vietnam, so many things could go wrong. Iraq is a large, modern, heavily urbanized country. If we bomb it apart, are we going to be wise enough to put it back together? Have Mr. Wolfowitz and his fellow sunshine warriors calculated the effects of an American war on feelings among Arabs and other Muslims? What would follow Saddam? The nature of a post-Saddam government in Iraq is a crucial concern for Iran, Turkey, Syria, and others; but the Bush administration has shown no sign of having an answer to that question.” – Anthony Lewis, the current New York Review of Books.
“If all this means what it says – war [with Iraq] – then George Bush is taking his country and the world into a tragedy of appalling dimensions. It would be a war with enormous casualties and with destabilizing effects beyond calculation… Listening to the President talk to the Marines, one might think that a war with Iraq would be quick and easy. Mr. Bush might have been giving a pep talk before a game. But it would almost certainly not be quick or easy. And not beneficently simple in its results. A war with Iraq could devastate a huge area of the Middle East. It could arouse many Arabs, even those critical of Saddam Hussein, against the United States.” – Anthony Lewis, November 23, 1990, The New York Times.
MELISSA RULES: A small but wonderful landmark in last night’s game. I thought Melissa Etheridge’s rendition of the national anthem was superb. I felt proud as a gay man that an open lesbian sang so beautifully and powerfully at the final game of the World Series. A simple, undemonstrative moment of actual integration. May more follow.
EMAIL OF THE DAY:
As a former daily newspaper reporter, I am struck that everything we thought we knew about the Washington “sniper” was wrong:
1. He was not an “angry white male” or “right-wing gun nut.”
2. He was not acting alone.
3. He was not using a “white box truck.”
4. He was not in a “white van with ladder racks on top.”
5. He was not “watching television coverage and reacting to it” since he was living in his car.
6. He was not a “delivery guy familiar with the area who knows all the back alleys and escape routes.”
7. He was not a guy “going to work each day like a normal person” and killing in his “off hours.”
8. His choice of the Washington, D.C., area as his killing ground was not coincidental. He had to cross a continent to get there.
The Dish 