Took a long weekend, as some of you noticed. The Dish will get more steam up as the day progresses and as my hangover recedes. But I’m traveling today too – back again from Chicago, where Memorial Day was spectacularly beautiful. On breaking stories, Mickey Kaus has the latest on the NYT meltdown. The scandal now, apparently, is not that Rick Bragg regularly ripped off stringers for his pieces (with no credit) but that this is NYT policy. Gets better all the time, doesn’t it? But I did get a chance to read John Colapinto’s excellent take on the next generation of college Republicans in Adam Moss’s magazine. Yep, they’re much more comfortable with diversity (including gays) than their predecessors. Their conservatism takes this multicultural reality as a base and builds an intelligent conservatism on top of the new world we live in. I wish the GOP would not have to wait a generation to get this message. But it’s one I’ve been preaching in this space for quite a while. Glad to see the younger generation gets it.
THE SECRET OF ANNIKA’S POPULARITY: Yes, she’s sexy. But the way in which the public rallied behind Annika Sorenstam’s pioneering golf game was surely because of something else: she represented an old, pure form of feminism, a message that has been somewhat lost in the politically correct culture wars of the last decade or so. Sorenstam, after all, was not portraying herself as a victim of male oppression. She’s a fabulously successful sportswoman, a wealthy celebrity, and happily married. She wasn’t asking for special treatment in any way. She played exactly the same course, under exactly the same conditions as her male peers. Despite the fact that women’s courses are generally shorter and less troublesome than men’s, Sorenstam played with the big boys – and beat many of them. And she’s refreshingly free of political posturing. She’s not aiming to be a feminist icon. She’s trying to play golf as best she can against the best competition in the world. She is also not attempting to deny the obvious: that there are significant differences between men and women. The more we learn about the impact of hormones such as testosterone and estrogen and the deeper our understanding of evolutionary psychology, the clearer it is that some differences – in physical strength, subtle mental attributes, emotional temperament – can vary with gender. That’s why we don’t have co-ed sprinting races or expect women to compete with men in the shot-put. But what we have in common as human beings vastly overwhelms what differentiates us as members of one gender or another. Sorenstam is a pioneer in accepting this, and reveling in it. She’s not indistinguishable from the men; but she is competitive with them. She’s different but equal. Americans are far more comfortable with this kind of social message – and for a good reason. It’s about integration, not separatism. It’s about personal achievement, not group grievance. It’s about merit, not complaint. It’s about golf, not politics. Sorenstam cannot be accused of claiming any “special rights.” She’s embracing the old American virtue of doing your best against the best, and not letting anything – gender, race, class, religion, sexual orientation – get in the way. That was once the core, simple, unifying message of the civil rights movement. Odd, isn’t it, that it took a Swedish female golfer to remind us.
POSEUR ALERT I: “This manly exhibition was no accident. The media team that timed Bush’s appearance [on the U.S.S. Lincoln] to catch just the right tone of sunlight must have chosen that uniform and had him try it on. I can’t prove they gave him a sock job, but clearly they thought long and hard about the crotch shot. As students of the cinematic, they would know that the trick is to make the bulge seem natural, so it registers without raising an issue. Tight jeans (a staple of Bush’s dress-down attire) can achieve this look, but nothing works like fighter-pilot drag, with its straps that frame and shape the groin. Most people presume this effect is merely functional. That frees the imagination to work, and work it does, in men and women alike … Say what you will about the male body being objectified. We may expect a dude to display himself like an Abercrombie & Fitch model – but the president? Clearly Bush’s handlers want to leave the impression that he’s not just courageous and competent but hung.” – Richard “proud sissy” Goldstein, Village Voice.
POSEUR ALERT II: “This eulogy owes nothing to artifice or chance. It has ripened inside me since childhood. From the bottom of my pockets, stuck to the back of my smock, hidden in the corner of abacuses, poetry gushed out-…” – Dominique de Villepin, from the preface of his new book, “In Praise Of Those Who Stole The Fire.”
The Dish 