Month: February 2007

Yes, I know it looks like I’m shilling for my new home. But the greatest gay American has been covered in the pages of this magazine for well over a century – and here’s a diverting account of the ups and downs of his literary reputation.

Once the decision was made to foment anarchy in Iraq – a decision made with clear foresight by Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – the chance of Americans to influence events in a country they don’t begin to understand was thrown away. The great delusion of the pathetic rearranging of deck-chairs called "the surge" is that we are somehow supposed to believe that four years after we abandoned control of Iraq, we can regain it with a handful of new troops. We can’t. A civil war is underway in Iraq to test the real power of the various factions and sects in the country. There will be no peace until such a rebalancing of power is finished. That will mean, alas, ethnic cleansing, more violence, hideous atrocities and the risk of regional war. So be it. It’s already under way under American occupation; the only problem is that young Americans are – ludicrously – supposed to police it.

The alternative, sane option is laid out with characteristic lucidity today by Edward Luttwak in the NYT. It is to withdraw to the borders, Kurdistan or distant bases within Iraq and allow the war to sort itself out. Only then will real power-brokers emerge able to make a real deal; only then will the future of the deserts and cities of Iraq find a new political settlement. The only thing preventing this from occurring is president Bush’s pride and stupidity. But Iraq and America have each suffered both signature characteristics of George W. Bush for longer than either deserve. It’s long past time to cut our losses and acknowledge reality.

Would this lead to a regional war? It’s perfectly possible. But it could also lead to the powers of the region actually acting in rational ways to achieve a new and more stable balance of power. The culture of dependency on U.S. security guarantees has not helped Muslim moderation or Middle East peace over the last two decades. Such dependency gave us al Qaeda and 9/11. Slowly weaning the Saudis and Egyptians off such dependency could be a healthy move. Already, the Saudis, in the wake of U.S. withdrawal, are countering Iranian influence in the region with far more skill and sophistication than the Bush administration ever could. The U.S can still be a major player from the margins – just not the regional hegemon in the center.

This is the silver lining of Iraq’s disintegration. It could help rearrange the region to a more stable balance of power. It could do so by a brutal regional war; or by a slow, intermittently violent process of terror, diplomacy and strategic positioning. Either way, the less the U.S. is directly involved in one side or another, the more options we retain for the future. Disengagement, in other words, is defeat. But it is defeat in a war we have already lost. It could mean a gain in a war that is only just beginning. Which could mean victory in the end, whatever victory at this point can be understood to mean.

(Photo: Iraqi troops by Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP.)

Buckley and Gilder defend D’Souza. Gilder pens the following phrase:

the anti-religious, sexual liberationist, anti-natalist and feminist thrust of American foreign, cultural, and free-speech global Internet policies.

You can almost see the spittle flying through the air.

It’s a tough one.

A brief foray into deep chav-land.

He previously said he’d struggled with his sexual orientation his entire life; now, he’s "completely heterosexual." He is now claiming his sole sexual outlet was the one prostitute, Mike Jones. And yet he is being treated for "sexual addiction." Er: adultery with one other partner is not sexual addiction. Let’s put it this way: even the quacks behind reparative therapy for homosexuals do not believe a few weeks of therapy will do the trick. (A few years and you can function heterosexually without wanting to kill yourself.) And so the psychological and spiritual abuse that Haggard has imposed on others and is now imposing on himself continues for another cycle of denial and pathology. And that is what, sadly, a great deal of Christian fundamentalism is caught up in: a vortex of denial of reality and rigid psychological resistance to self-acceptance. It is, in my view, a fear-gripped rejection of the beneficence and compassion of God, not an openness toward the divine. It’s a therapy that is actually an illness. And Haggard is getting sicker.

And he just happens to be Dick Cheney’s money manager:

This is not some rainbow coalition. This is not even Al Gore. [Jeremy] Grantham is the chairman of Boston-based fund management company Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo. He is British-born but has lived here since the early 1960s.

Grantham is, like most fund managers, prudent, conservative and inclined to favor the free market and smaller government. He has even said he supported Bush-Cheney in 2000. That doesn’t make him particularly political. He also manages a portion of the Heinz-Kerry fortune, as well as those of many other wealthy types.

But he’s certainly a man Cheney respects highly. According to the vice president’s last personal financial disclosure form, filed with the Federal Election Commission, Cheney has somewhere between $1.6 million and $6 million of his family’s money invested in four of Grantham’s funds. These aren’t even index funds. These are discretionary funds, where you trust the manager to look at the landscape, analyze all the data, and make the best investments. Cheney must have a lot of faith in Grantham’s judgement and analytical skills.

And what does Grantham believe? That America’s carbon-based energy policy is nuts. He just sent out an email to clients called  "While America Slept, 1982-2006: A Rant on Oil Dependency, Global Warming, and a Love of Feel-Good Data." Maybe the veep will read it.

Academics discover bear culture. Oy. Money quote:

The work of Yale historian George Chauncey has been especially influential in bear-culture scholarship. In his 1994 book "Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940," Chauncey explored turn-of-the-century working-class men who adopted a highly masculine personal style and rejected what they regarded as middle-class effete gay-male behavior (in those days, bears called themselves "wolves").

A number of scholars have searched for more recent examples of a bear presence in American culture. In his 1992 book, "The Bear Cult," art historian Edward Lucie-Smith traced the big-muscled imagery of today’s bears to 1950s gladiator movies. In the minutes of a now-defunct Los Angeles gay organization, the Satyrs, Wright discovered a 1966 reference to the formation of a Bear Club, perhaps the first known instance of the term being used in the sense it is employed today.

My own view is that the minute you start taking bear culture too seriously, you’ve lost it. It’s fun and unpretentious and easy-going. And slovenly masculinity has always been integral to male homosexuality; it has just often been eclipsed by heterosexual obsession with gender-nonconformism among homosexuals. And indeed, many gay men are far from typically masculine; but many are also indistinguishable from chubby, hairy straight guys who watch sports on television. The cultural lineage of masculine homosexuality in America goes back a long way. Ever heard of Walt Whitman, arguably the most distinguished gay American in history (if you don’t count Lincoln)? And it’s all good.

(Photo of Walt Whitman by Matthew Brady, from c. 1860.)

"Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense," – Carl Sagan.

Or: how to foment violence against minorities in order to sell candy. I have to say that the TV ad struck me as pretty funny and harmless – but the web content is ugly.