Month: June 2003

Yes, it looks as if the Canadians are not going to settle for a true attack on marriage by coming up with a lesser institution for gays and less serious straights. The country could well establish equal marriage rights soon. Meanwhile, an Anglican ceremony in Canada blessing a gay partnership of 21 years has created another rift in the Church of England. I’d think that any marriage that lasts 21 years these days is worth some sort of celebration. But not, for some, if it means celebrating gay men or lesbians committed to faithfulness and responsibility in their relationships.

SONTAG ETC: I feel a little bad for quoting one line from Susan Sontag’s commencement address. It was self-parodic, but the rest of her speech struck me as sane and fresh. I linked, but I still feel sheepish. I should also say that Jonathan Landman’s email turns out not to have been prompted by my post yesterday. He says it was a separate response to my email of last week, and since it came to my private email address (from which I sent the first query), he deserves the benefit of the doubt. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.

Check out this cartoon from the Chicago Tribune last Friday.

Mickey has the goods on the latest piece of half-baked crusaderism from the New York Times – this time abandoning the usual rules of journalism to go after those evil drug companies – yes, the same evil drug companies that have saved the lives of countless people like me. But he’s also on the case of Michael Wolff, the toast of Manhattan’s media elite. Wolff has defended the New York Times, and has a post-modern approach to what he calls

the line between absolute fact and the instinctual sense of how far over the line of absolute fact it’s safe to go, which is more and more the real tradecraft. Nor is it really possible to explain that smartness in a soft-news world involves a certain quality of plasticity.

What does he mean? In common language, he means that it’s ok to make stuff up if you’re as smart and brilliant as Michael Wolff is. I’m glad Wolff has now made his own journalistic ethic transparent. But I knew it already. He wrote a profile of me for New York Magazine over a year ago. I’m used to sloppy reporting, attitude-driven prose, and complete contempt for the truth in magazine journalism, but even I was shocked by the piece. It was riddled with errors; he grotesquely distorted a quote for his own purposes (he later conceded he had in an email); he had clearly read none of my books, while giving the impression he had; and when challenged privately about all this, he responded that the column was about how he feels, not about the reality. That same column – complete fantasy – was then given a National Magazine Award! No wonder Wolff defends fabulists. He is one. And that’s why today’s New York journalism hails him.

The fusion of Christianity and fascism is not new, of course. The Nazis’ Deutsche Christen openly coopted the Gospels in order to preach their opposite. But the story of Eric Rudolph shows that this strain endures in some parts of the world. Here’s the email that prosecutors think Rudolph may have written to justify his bombings of abortion clinics and gay bars and the inter-racial aspects of the Olympics:

“We declare and will wage total war on the ungodly communist regime in New York and your legaslative bureaucratic lackey’s in Washington. It is you who are responsible and preside over the murder of children and issue the policy of ungodly preversion thats destroying our people.”

It’s premature to put these words into Rudolph’s mouth. And, of course, the whole concept of a Christian terrorist is a hideous oxymoron. But the crusades were a form of terrorism. So was the inquisition at a state level. The Christian Identity movement, with which Rudolph was associated, is clearly a Christo-fascist organization. In fact, this is probably a better term for those who adhere to what appears to be Rudolph’s ideology. And the fact that the even the teachings of a first century preacher of non-violence could be turned into fascist terror merely shows the extent to which any religion can be distorted away from its essence.

It seems posting the question about whether Joyce Wadler did indeed write the column ascribed to her is a more effective way of getting an answer from the New York Times than writing to its complaints department. Here’s Jon Landman’s email addressing the question I asked this morning:

Dear Mr. Sullivan,
You have been misinformed. Joyce Wadler did indeed write the column in question before she left for the Memorial Day weekend (it ran on the Tuesday immediately following). She did rely more heavily than usual on Campbell Robertson’s file, which is why she gave him (unnamed) credit. Campbell is a very talented young man who writes his files so well that Joyce can use unusually big chunks of them with less rewriting than would otherwise be necessary. (The reason Joyce showed me his file was to make sure people recognize his ability.) But the voice of that column – one of the most distinctive and personal in the newspaper – was clearly Joyce’s. I would add that Joyce has long argued vigorously for an exception to our usual practice of not giving named credit to legmen and women. She won the argument the day the Tuesday column ran – it was the last to run without taglines crediting her helpers. Which may want to make you rethink your conclusion that “lots of people in control at The Times still don’t get it.”
cheers, Jon Landman

Hmmm. So in future, the columns will include extra by-lines to reflect the people who actually compose them. Progress. But this new policy does indeed suggest that previously, there was an inappropriate lack of correct attribution. My insider reader wasn’t totally off the mark. I wonder who it was.

Glenn Reynolds has an up-beat post on progress in the war on terror. I share most of his feelings on this, although I share most deeply his admission that it’s very hard to tell for sure. I’m worried we still don’t have enough troops in Iraq; but I’m not a long-term pessimist about the country. Rummy isn’t spinning when he says it will take a long long time. Well, he may be spinning but he may also be right. Whatever the problems Iraq faces, the removal of Saddam is not resented by any serious Iraqis; and the daily news of the mass murders that took place regularly under Saddam only confirm more deeply the moral imperative of that truly just war. My prediction that Bush really would tackle the Israeli-Palestinian impasse has also been borne out; and Sharon’s use of the word “occupation” tells me he’s serious about a nation-saving deal. As to whether Abbas can deliver, call me a hopeful pessimist. More broadly, I’m worried about French mischief around the globe, especially their latest attempt to revamp the European Union to undermine any nation states on the continent tilting toward the U.S. (I have a long essay due out soon on this very subject). But I still believe that the biggest story of the past two years is al Qaeda’s reeling. I’m amazed we haven’t had another huge attack in the U.S. and believe the Bush administration deserves some credit for that. Heck, it deserves a lot of credit. To my mind, freedom from terror is still easily the most important objective of this moment. On that – despite my misgivings about his big spending and coziness with some on the far right – Bush deserves continued, critical support.

Almost two years ago, I wondered if there was something about monotheism that lent itself to a fringe of its adherents pursuing the demands of godly truth to the ultimate conclusion: terror. Religion, of course, is not the sole motivator of terror. The secular religions of Marxism and Nazism did just as well. But the politicized zeal of the saved is still deeply dangerous – and not just when it is expressed non-violently and seeks merely to marginalize and disenfranchise those who do not share certain tenets of the faith. Eric Rudolph was just such a figure. He was a warped Christian fundamentalist who murdered for his cause. He bombed symbols of individual freedom, constitutional rights and minority intransigence. He is our Osama. In his refuge, he had, like other terrorists, the implicit support of a population who shared his beliefs, if not the extremism that sanctioned his killings. If we are to call John Muhammed a religiously inspired terrorist (and I think we should) then we have to call Rudolph a Christian terrorist. I propose a new term for those on the fringes of the religious right who have used the Gospels to perpetuate their own aspirations for power, control and oppression: Christianists. They are as anathema to true Christians as the Islamists are to true Islam. And they have to be fought just as vigilantly.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Try to imagine at least once a day that you are not an American.” – Susan Sontag, in a recent commencement address.

My take on the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction question is now posted. It includes an assessment of our policy toward Iran, an urgent discussion the administration seems to be shelving for another day. On that subject, Reuel Marc Gerecht’s cover-story in the current Weekly Standard is a must-read. My own (not completely settled) view is that an Osirak-like military attack on the mullah’s Manhattan Project may be the least worst option we now have.

BELL CURVE LIBERALS: My old friend, Jeff Rosen, had a typically fresh and smart piece in yesterday’s NYT Magazine (still able to avoid the worst of Howell Raines’ meddling). Jeff is viscerally against affirmative action, but he has come to endorse it. Why? Because if it’s abolished, universities will only opt for more egalitarian methods to achieve racial diversity and could trash academic standards even more thoroughly than the current system. It’s an argument of elegant surrender. The assumption of his case – indeed of the entire debate – is that minorities will simply as a matter of fact always score lower in test scores. That’s a given for the foreseeable future, if not for ever. Mickey Kaus once described those liberals who simply assume the permanent neediness of minorities as “Bell Curve Liberals,” people who would never admit it but have internalized the notion that minorities are simply dumber than the majority. They either believing that such inferiority is in part genetic and in part environmental or entirely environmental. But the upshot is always the same: these people are helpless; and all we can do is rig the system to disguise it as much as possible and minimize social resentment and division. The only way we can have racial integration in universities is therefore by destroying academic standards. I’m sorry, but I can’t go there. If the alternative to quotas is the evisceration of standards, then we truly have lost our faith in the power of meritocracy and the equality of the races. Jeff’s argument, while compelling, is a counsel of despair. We should resist it. Keep the standards. Drop the quotas.

Excellent piece by Peter Beinart on the Bush administration’s double standards on agricultural subsidies. Bush has been rightly lecturing the Europeans on their vast subsidies for agricultural products, which do as much as anything to kill off the fledgling development of poorer countries and benefit only a few, wealthy agri-businesses. But Bush, being the big government big spender he is, has signed a bill shoveling even more tax-payers’ cash to farmers. Beinart moves in for the kill, noting:

… the subsidy on cotton, which the 2002 law more than doubled, from 35 to 72 cents per pound. The United States is a highly inefficient cotton producer; in fact, America’s production costs are roughly three times those in the West African nation of Burkina Faso. Yet Burkina Faso is losing market share because the United States subsidizes its cotton industry by roughly $2 billion per year (three times as much as the U.S. Agency for International Development spends annually on Africa). According to Oxfam, the United States actually spends more subsidizing the production of cotton than it earns selling it-making the industry a net loss to the U.S. economy. Those subsidies go to America’s 25,000 cotton farmers, who boast an average net worth of $800,000; by contrast, the average yearly wage in Burkina Faso is roughly $200.

If Bush were actually an economic conservative, this would be a scandal. But, alas, he isn’t. I don’t mind tax cuts for the wealthy to encourage investment and growth. It’s the vast government subsidies to the wealthy – paid for by everyone – that stick in my throat. I’d hoped Bush might restrain those subsidies. In fact, in this case, he’s doubled them. It just gets depressing after a while, doesn’t it?

NYT CRAPOLA: An insider reader writes:

You should take a look at the Boldface Names column on Page 2 of The New York Times of Tuesday, May 27. Although it says in the Boldface Names/Joyce Wadler headline that the column was written by Joyce Wadler, in fact it was written in its entirety by Campbell Robertson, a clerk in Metro. Joyce Wadler was off on holiday. The column at one point mentions “our young Boldface Names reporter.” But, of course, the reader would naturally assume that since Wadler’s name is over the whole column, she wrote all or at least most of it. This deception occurred with the approval of Jon Landman, Jayson Blair’s old boss, and shows that lots of people in control at The Times still don’t get it, even after all that has gone on lately.

So who did write the column? And what rules apply to this kind of thing? Last week, I emailed this question to retrace@nytimes.com. No response, natch. I have no idea whether this is true or not. Maybe posting this item will prompt a reply.

Reading the late and not too-informative NYT piece on gay Republicans, I stopped in my tracks at this piece of news:

As president, Mr. Bush has appointed several openly gay people, including James C. Hormel, the ambassador to Romania, to high-level jobs…

Huh? Hormel is a Democratic party fundraiser and was appointed by president Clinton to be ambassador to Luxemburg, a position that some Republican homophobes opposed. In fact, it was a pretty famous cause celebre at the time. How the Times’ reporter on gay issues could have gotten this wrong is simply beyond me. How fact-checking didn’t correct it is also unbelievable. You know, it really is that bad at the “paper of record.”