Year: 2003

A reader urges us to get our Tom Lehrer song-book open again. Here’s a goodie:

We are the Folk Song Army.
Everyone of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares.

That just about sums it up, doesn’t it?

Hmmm. Are the French beginning to acknowledge reality? Today’s editorial in Le Monde is called “L’Apres Guerre,” and contains the following sentences:

All smiles, defense secretary Rumsfeld predicted a brief war: “Six days? Six weeks?” Let’s accept that assessment. What then? What about the after-war? … To ask these questions is not to defend the indefensible status quo, the Saddam dictatorship.

The indefensible status quo. But wasn’t that exactly what the French supported only recently, covered by the fig-leaf that somehow more inspectors would make a blind bit of difference? I think Colin Powell was more effective than some gave him credit for.

THE PRICE OF SUPPORT: Bill Keller is a sensible fellow. But his piece this morning gives an insight into how otherwise sensible liberals can come to support this war: only by simultaneously deriding and condescending to the president who made it possible. Is peer pressure that great? I guess so.

Yep, they’re organizing, as Len Garment notes in this morning’s Times. The dreaded march of stanzas, caesuras and iambic pentameters has begun. If you feel like a dose of acute nausea, take a look at the website called “Poetsagainstthewar.org.” It contains the usual anti-Bush hysteria. Here’s a Sontag Award nominee from W.S. Merwin: “[I]f the reasons for war were many times greater than they have been said to be I would oppose any thing of the kind under such ‘leadership’. To arrange a war in order to be re-elected outdoes even the means employed in the last presidential election. Mr. Bush and his plans are a greater danger to the United States than Saddam Hussein.” Well at least we know where he’s coming from. But my favorite is a poem from one Marilyn Hacker. It contains verses such as the following:

“(‘God Bless America’ would be blasphemy
if there were a god concerned with humanity.)”

Charming, huh? Or this:

“Jews who learned their comportment from storm-troopers
act out the nightmares that woke their grandmothers;
Jews sit, black-clad, claim peace: their vigil’s
not on the whistlestop pol’s agenda.

‘Our’ loss is grave: American, sacralized.
We are dismayed that dead Palestinians,
Kashmiris, Chechens, Guatemalans,
also are mourned with demands for vengeance.

‘Our’ loss is grave, that is, till a president
in spanking-new non-combatant uniform
mandates a war: then, men and women
dying for oil will be needed heroes.

I’d rather live in France (or live anywhere
there’s literate debate in the newspapers).
The English language is my mother
tongue, but it travels. Asylum, exile?”

Asylum, please.

My old friend and colleague Mickey Kaus has been having great fun at the expense of the New York Times’ desperate, and increasingly incoherent editorial shifts on Iraq. He’s right to. But doesn’t he also have an obligation to tell us what he actually thinks? Mickey has given almost no actual analysis of the most important question we are currently facing, despite running a 24-hour, Microsoft-funded blog. What’s up with that? Mr Raines may have declining credibility on this matter, but at least he’s saying something. Shouldn’t Mickey refrain from criticizing others for saying nothing until he has the good graces to take a stand? And I don’t mean how an Iraq war could impact welfare reform or the latest designs from Toyota.

BRENT BOZELL’S GAY PROBLEM: I’m not exactly one to come to Eric Alterman’s defense, but with the figure of Brent Bozell, you really do have an example of someone who appears woefully ignorant about the political diversity among homosexuals. For Bozell, along with, I might add, left-wing ideologues like Richard Goldstein, any openly gay person is ipso facto a liberal. Bozell simply assumes in this column that Rick Berke and Frank Bruni of the New York Times are left-liberals solely because they’re gay. Now Rick is a flaming liberal, as well as a master of New York Times internal politics. But Frank Bruni clearly isn’t in any ideological sense. Anyone who read his last book on George Bush would have a hard time saying that Bruni is ideologically blinded to Bush’s strengths (and weaknesses) as a president. But Bozell simply asserts that Bruni is a liberal because he is gay. That’s dumb and demeaning. He also asserts that the only reason that the Bush administration is not avowedly homophobic is because it’s intimidated by openly gay people in the media. Isn’t that a bit presumptive? An alternative theory might be that Bush and Cheney know enough gay people to realize that they cannot be generalized about politically; and decent enough not to reduce someone’s politics to their sexual identity. Maybe Dick Cheney has a better understanding of homosexuality than Bozell because his own daughter is gay, and he respects and loves her. For the record, I think that most of the big media are indeed pro-gay, compared to the center of gravity in the rest of the country. But that doesn’t justify the out-dated generalizations and assumptions of Brent Bozell.

Gay left supporter James Romenesko runs a blog linking to liberal stories and opinion in the media. If Eric Alterman sneezes, there’s an item. But if someone right-of-center has anything to say about the media, it’s ignored. A good example today: Jonah Goldberg’s excellent and provocative piece about media overkill on the Columbia disaster. It’s a big piece in a big paper, the Wall Street Journal. Look at what else Romenesko links to today – an end to the Miami Herald spelling bee! a college meat-eating contest! – and ask yourself the reasons for the lacuna. In fact, see if you can find any stories in the past week that deviate even slightly from left-liberal politics. Romenesko has every right to run a left-liberal blog on the media, of course. But he should be candid about his biases. He’s a propagandist. And a very good one.

It looks like he did.

Read the entire interview. She certainly cannot be dismissed as a Bush-hating anti-American. Her argument, I think, is that war could inflame the Middle East and spawn even more Islamic fundamentalist terror. I think she’s wrong. My own belief is that terror relies on Western passivity, and is galvanized by Western weakness. That’s what the 1990s showed. But of course, war is awful, unpredictable and deeply dangerous. Her preferred option – giving inspectors months more time in order to get a global consensus – strikes me as naive. It assumes the good will of countries like France and Russia. I don’t. And it assumes that we can somehow dampen Islamist extremism by inaction or soothing words. Sorry, but the 90s proved that strategy wrong. We ducked and weaved and appeased – and the threat merely grew. A climb-down now would do more to strengthen the Islamo-fascists than any war. In fact, it would unleash a wave of terror the like of which we have not yet seen.

I assumed most readers would have recognized some of the most famous lines of poetry written in the last fifty years in my little squib on Jacko. But in case you didn’t, I should hasten to add that “Man hands on misery to man/It deepens like a coastal shelf” refer to Philip Larkin’s treasure of a poem, “This Be The Verse.” If you don’t know his poetry, you really really should. Here’s a link to his collected work. Buy it.

“U.S. Economy in Worst Hiring Slump in 20 Years” – NYT, February 6.
“Unemployment Rate Falls to 5.7% as Job Growth Surges” – NYT, February 7.
D’oh!

Update on my 2002 Man of the Year. Best detail: he has declined all media interviews.