Month: January 2007

A reader sends in a decade-old online quiz to determine whether you are a "conservative" or a "liberal." Actually, it’s more like a political Kinsey scale, where 40 is the most conservative and 0 is the most liberal. I scored 26 – which makes me a moderate conservative, I guess.

"Interestingly enough, one administration official admitted to us today that this surge option is more of a political decision than a military one because the American people have run out of patience and President Bush is running out of time to achieve some kind of success in Iraq. While this plan will clearly draw some stiff opposition on Capitol Hill, the president is expected to announce it a week from today," – NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski, on the reasoning behind the new Iraq "strategy."

I went to see the Alan Bennett movie last night and I’m still somewhat discombobulated. I’d heard about the play but I didn’t fully realize how personally it would hit home. It’s set in a doppleganger of the school I went to – an all-boys, middling grammar school in middle England in the early 1980s. The school tie – dark blue with diagonal, thin white stripes – was identical to mine, at Reigate Grammar. The drama takes place around a group of sixth-formers taking their Oxford and Cambridge exams in 1983. I took my Oxford exam in 1981. As the boys go to Oxford for their interviews, I even saw shots of my old rooms at Magdalen. My subject was history, as was theirs’. I crammed Tudor Economic Documents into my overly-fertile brain, as they did into theirs’. I had a crush on the school jock, as the gay kid does in the movie. And I remember with great nostalgia the effortless male bonding and ribald camaraderie of the all-boys English school that the movie evokes beautifully. I was, in many ways, so happy then. Except, of course, my life was beginning to be torn apart by the issue of my homosexuality, which is, in another exquisite touch, the central plot of the play. The mixture of being totally accepted and yet not accepted, the peculiar experience of homosexual displacement, is hard to convey to outsiders, but Bennett does it brilliantly and funnily. It’s strange to see one’s own life filtered through another lens, scrambled and reimagined by the genius of Bennett’s empathy and wit, and thrown at the screen with such scary precision and insight.

A line it from the lonely gay schoolboy was almost too much to hear: "I’m Jewish. I’m homosexual. And I’m in Sheffield …  I’m fucked." Somewhere in my mind in those teenage years was a similar refrain: "I’m Catholic. I’m homosexual. And I’m in East Grinstead … I’m fucked." But I wasn’t fucked, of course. And not-to-be-fucked, not to turn into the tragic homosexual figure, memorizing "Brief Encounter," constantly chasing unrequited love, seeking refuge in the great worlds of Hardy or Larkin or Auden as a substitute for life: that was my goal. To be fucked in the right way, I guess – something that wouldn’t happen, alas, for many years thereafter.

I never had a mentor like the play’s Hector, played flawlessly by Richard Griffith, although various teachers in various ways gave me a sense of the deeper wider world of ideas, of truth, of learning. Bennett is brutal about my profession – journalism – and his point is unanswerable. We are the shallow men, we hacks. We are the shallowest of the hacks, we bloggers. And to be transported back to the days when one is "overwhelmed by the limitless invitations of a human existence", and when "the long littleness of life is yet undreamed," is to be reminded of what paths we didn’t take.

But one path not taken I do not regret. The great achievement of the great homosexual creators of the past was their sublimation of excruciating emotional pain into erudition and pedagogy and integrity in the abstract world of vicarious living. You see the emotional wreckage of such a path in Hector’s own bloated carcass of a body. The dehumanizing obesity of the character is the outward scar-tissue of inward emotional death. This, I recall, is what society demands I become. This, I recall insisting, I will not become. And I haven’t. Neither has a generation. That is our tentative achievement so despised by so many. It is still fragile. It had to survive a plague and may be eclipsed by a looming spasm of religious hatred. But we have proved one thing that is worth proving: Happiness is an option. We need not be fucked for ever.

"Freedom of speech is one of the basics of our country. Yes, we have freedom of religion but not for people aspiring to run our country.

I attend Christian conferences and one that stands out in my memory is the Northern Ohio Christian Conference held at Oberlin College, winter and summer. One summer, a Christian from the Middle East traveled from Asia to Europe to America to address the conference, which he was permitted to do. His message was: The Communists are not your enemy but the Muslims.

As Virgil Goode stated, when you take an oath in this country or are being sworn in to serve the country, your right hand is upon a Bible. I believe this is true in a jury trial. You swear to tell the truth and the Bible represents the truth to most of us. Americans fought the Revolutionary War to gain their freedoms and we are not about to let any immigrants strip it away from us.

Citizenship in this country is available to those who wish to enjoy our freedoms and rights. Why not become an American?" – a letter to the editor in Charlottesville’s Daily Progress.

Santiago, Chile, 2 pm, in a reader’s favorite restaurant.

I recall on the eve of the Iraq war wrestling with final doubts and being reassured by two things in my own mind: a) Saddam was so evil that removing him would by itself make the world a better place (my liberal, neocon side); b) we can always buy support from the Iraqis by pouring reconstruction funds in as soon as we impose order (my cynical, paleocon side). Of course, since Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were determined not to restore order, and content to manage chaos, my judgments were thrown completely off. They even managed to screw up Saddam’s death. But the reconstruction failure is deeper and more damning. Ken Pollack has a serious recap of the debacle here, in a piece published last month that I missed in pre-Christmas frenzy. Money quote:

Perhaps at some point in the future, revisionist historians will try to claim that the effort was doomed from the start, that it never was possible to build a stable, let alone pluralistic, new Iraq in the rubble of Saddam Hussein’s fall. However, that is decidedly not the view of the experts, the journalists covering the story, or the practitioners who went to Iraq to put the country back together after the 2003 invasion. Americans returning from Iraq – military and civilian alike – have proven unanimous in their view that the Iraqis desperately want reconstruction to succeed and that they have the basic tools to make it work, but that the United States has consistently failed to provide them with the opportunities and the framework to succeed.

Jake Weisberg helpfully draws the following conclusion:

There is, of course, no way to know what might have happened if we hadn’t made these mistakes, and others. An American defeat still would have been possible with better planning, sufficient troops, realistic goals, and sound strategy. But even in this mistakenly chosen war, our failure wasn’t inevitable. It is the product of blunders made along the way by President Bush and his people‚Äîand the blunders they are making still.

It’s still too early to make a definitive judgment on this issue, but I think the evidence now tilts decisively in favor of the argument that the Iraq war was always going to be very hard to pull off, but what chances it had were unforgivably bungled by its leaders, whose errors of ignorance became copounded by errors of arrogance. Contingency, as always, rules.

They can come together on one always-unifying issue: dogs.

That’s the magic number of extra troops needed for a "surge" in Iraq to be credible, according to John Keegan.

The Vatican’s Swiss Guards are upset by new regulations against staying up all night.

A reader writes:

I read your blog regularly and the website of Mickey Kaus and Bob Wright, bloggingheads.tv. It never made sense to me why Mickey Kaus, who seems from all accounts a very decent and open-minded man, should be so fixated on issues of gay marriage, and in particular, your treatment of gay marriage. I do not think his discomfort with homosexuals and homosexual marriage is based on any religious objection. I do think it is based on his objection to what you are doing, indeed what you have been critical in doing over the last twenty years, which is normalizing (is that a verb?) homosexuality.

Mickey Kaus is frustrated because he can’t put you in the box that has been historically assigned to gay men: that is, bent on destroying the morals of our nation. Obviously, gay marriage, widely practiced, threatens to undermine this notion. Thus, Mr. Kaus is left practically speechless, or at best, has to remain content insinuating about "moral entropy". Like religious or spiritual objections, such an assertion is untestable and impossible to rebut. If he were truly brave, he would state what I think is truly in his mind, that gay men make him uncomfortable and that gay marriage would permanently normalize homosexuality, a political and social project which troubles him greatly.  Because he travels in very elite liberal and conservative circles, he is not able to raise this kind of objection without risking the scorn of his friends and colleagues. Thus, you really tie him up in knots. It’s quite amusing, really, to watch him get bent out of shape at the mention of your name.

Or maybe Mickey has a better expanation.