I’ve said this before, but I think Marjorie Williams is onto something when she notices that many of Howard Dean’s self-inflicted wounds come from the foibles of his profession. Many doctors are not used to dealing with equals; they dictate to patients; they know everything; they can impose their will on other people’s bodies with astonishing ruthlessness; they get prickly when challenged; and they tend to believe that every problem can be solved with the help of their peerless intellect. I’m extremely leery of doctors in politics – right or left, they always veer toward the intolerant, dictatorial and secretive. They belong to one of the least democratic professions imaginable and think they can transit effortlessly to the most. Like Williams, I’ve also dealt with a certain amount of illness, in myself and others. And so I’ve seen this phenomenon close-up. Of course, it’s not universal. In the course of my own adventures with HIV, I was lucky enough to find two amazing doctors: brilliant, empathetic, honest, forgiving. But they’re amazing largely because they’re the exception. Dean’s style worries me – almost as much as his substance.
IN AMERICA: A fallen soldier is buried in Texas. The photographs take your breath away.
TRANQUIL SOUTH: The Brits haven’t lost a military life in months in Basra. In time, we may see the post-war violence in Iraq as a simple continuation of Sunni efforts to control the country. Entrenched elites take time to remove – and to become reconciled to their loss of privilege.
BRITNEY’S CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT: Look, I know some of you will object to the logic, but can you not see how something like Britney Spears’ insta-marriage in Las Vegas might infuriate long-committed gay couples who, even now, don’t have a shred of the rights Ms Spears enjoyed for a few days? It is one thing for people to declare their commitment to traditional marriage – i.e. procreative, life-long, heterosexual. It is another thing when that ideal has almost no relationship to civil marriage as it now exists for straights; and when it is nevertheless used to deny gay people access to the institution. Over the holidays, I found myself watching all those VH1 list shows, and happened across the top ten or twenty (I forget which) shortest Hollywood marriages in history. Ha ha ha. We live a world in which Britney Spears just engaged in something “sacred” (in the president’s words), where instant and joke hetero marriages and divorces are a subject of titillation, and where a decades-long monogamous lesbian marriage is a threat to civilization as we know it. Please. Can we have a smidgen of consistency here?
The Dish 