Month: June 2007

Among the more anachronistic relics of the gay liberation period is the Pride Parade. No mystery why, in Manhattan and other blue-state oases, it’s a dying institution:

"I live in New York, and it’s sort of like every day is Gay Pride Parade," said Matt Davie, 37, an associate publisher at Simon & Schuster, standing in the main room of G Lounge in Chelsea on June 14. "It’s not this special day that I can suddenly throw on my rainbow flag, or whatever. That’s every day. I don’t need this special day where I’m out of the closet."

"We’ve been able to benefit from a lot of things from the Parade and all that it symbolizes, and now you have this option to opt out of it," said Mr. Patton, who goes every year largely because of his work at the Anti-Violence Project. "What you see is a lot of people exercising that option."

He said he and friends who work for gay causes talk often about whether they’d go if they didn’t have to for work. The consensus seems to be that they wouldn’t.

Last week, more than a dozen gay men interviewed at gay bars said they wouldn’t attend the parade (only two said they would: one who said he’s been living here for eight months, the other for nine months). One generation that actively attended seems to have grown up, and another younger one doesn’t seem interested to begin with.

A 26-year-old graduate student in art history at New York University, Joe Ackley, who was at the Phoenix last Wednesday, doesn’t go.

"I hate Pride. My friend and I celebrate Pride by going to straight bars."

The far left accuses the opters-out of being racist. Nah. They’re just bored. And faintly embarrassed.

The Village Voice has an article in the current issue on the question. More and  more people seem to be questioning the practice of scarring men’s genitals for life without their consent. The Voice includes a brief history of the practice outside the Jewish and Muslim communities:

The practice began in English-speaking countries in the mid-1800s as a way to prevent masturbation, which was believed to cause many diseases. By the 1900s, infant circumcision had become widespread thanks to the shift in control over the birthing process from female midwives to male obstetricians; the rise of medical experts, who began recommending it; and the increase of advertising aimed at convincing people they were dirty in order to sell hygiene products.

Scott Horton sees one:

So let us review how the stage is being set now for a war against Iran. We can say, of course, that war preparations are the essence of every sound military – that they should not be viewed as any sort of guarantor. A show of strength may avert war, as one of my Air Force friends correctly says. And to that I can only quote one of my best military analyst friends, who last night had one single word to cover all this: the word was "likely." "I have come to the conclusion that a major military conflict between the United States and Iran is now likely," he said. So what, exactly, does "likely" look like?

You might say that the soundest approach in feeling the path to any conflict is simple: "Watch what we do, and not what we say." So what are the U.S. and the Iranians doing that makes a conflict seem "likely"?

The evidence is striking. I worry about this not because I think we should never wield the threat of military force against Iran. It’s because events seem to be favoring the West in Iran anyway and a Cheney-driven bombing campaign could reverse it. Tehran’s theocrats, as this blog has reported (samizdat video from Tehran University here), have been cracking down on dissent more brutally than in a long time. They’re very insecure and with reason: their economy is going down the tubes (as always happens when you have absolutist maniacs running the show); they may soon have to ration gasoline; they have lost the next generation of Persians. Now is a rational time to focus on tightening the sanctions that have already taken a bite out of the regime. Ahmadinejad’s intransigence has helped keep even the Russians on board.

Instead of answering their extremism with our own belligerence, it seems to me we need to leverage the mullahs’ fanaticism against them. A bombing attack on a soveriegn nationa would do more to poison the younger generation’s view of us than anything Ahmadinejad can say. One day soon, that generation will have a huge influence on the Middle East. It’s time we realized that. Cheney is a one-man threat to exploiting that central strategic advantage.

"The freedom to criticize religion is not only a fundamental right; for those of us who are unbelievers it is also a kind of duty, since one must do one’s part in opposing belief not supported by evidence or reason or, as it appears to us in this case, anything compelling at all. But that is something different from treating religion as uniformly productive of harm or as having a monopoly on unreason and fanaticism, and from treating its adherents as worthy of contempt. To do this is ignorance and folly, – Norm Geras.

Rio, Brazil, 5.30 am.

For a freshly updated, interactive gallery of Dish readers’ window views across the world, click here.

My Sunday Times column on Blair:

The life of a poodle is often underrated. As dogs go, many enjoy the most pampered of existences and are smart enough to do the most intellectually demanding of tasks.

Poodle owners are often passionate about their pets, catering to their every whim, manipulated by their guile and tolerating their sometimes snippy relationships with other dogs. In many cases – and this is not restricted to poodles, of course – it’s hard to tell, after a while, who controls whom. The master routinely finds his days wrapped around catering for the poodle: walking it, grooming it, pandering to it. If the tail often wags the dog, the dog can also wag the human. And often does.

I’ve never understood, in this respect, why calling a British prime minister a poodle of the president of the United States is therefore always to the detriment of the Brit.

The rest is here.

(Photo: Stephen Hird/AFP/Getty.)

Looking on the bright side after week one:

The U.S. military commanders continue to state the operations will be ongoing through the end of the summer. The escape of Al Qaeda leaders and operatives from Baqubah and the southern belts will no doubt be touted as a failure in the plan, but this view demonstrates a lack of understanding of the fundamentals of warfare and the purpose of the operation.

First, no cordon is perfect, and the enemy has the ability to read the signs and act accordingly. It has been clear for months Baqubah would become a target of Coalition forces, and al Qaeda has its own sophisticated intelligence network that no doubt detected Coalition and Iraqi movements.

Second, the purpose of the Baghdad Security Plan and Operation Phantom Thunder is to deny al Qaeda Baghdad and the Belts, and to kill as many operatives and leaders as possible in the process. When al Qaeda attempts to regroup, it will be in the hinterlands, and in some cases, in regions less hospitable to its actions.

We can hope. But I’ll wait and see.

A cage dweller sits inside a cage on June 20, 2007 in Hong Kong, China. The poorest of Hong Kong’s citizens live in cage homes, steel mesh box constructions, stacked on top of each other. The division between poor and rich in the former British colony, which celebrates the 10th anniversary of its handover to Chinese rule on July 1, remains an unsolved problem. (Photo by MN Chan/Getty Images)

A reader writes:

Tonight with my daughter and wife I watched the first half of Stephen Frears’ and Peter Morgan’s The Queen. Your comments regarding Hillary remind me of the tone deaf comments and disposition of the royals in the film to Diana, her death and the public’s response to it. They just don’t get it. Tone deaf because no matter how closely you watched Hillary in the White House, you miss what she meant to some of us, what her senatorial career means to some of us, and what her chances of being the first female president means to us. Her book sold because many of us are moved by her work. Many of us prefer her to Bill who we also cherish in the same way we love and value Eleanor over FDR. Yes you were close up in the 1990s, but as Morton’s movie demonstrates, some phenomena are almost unrecognisable from up close.

My very precocious 9 year old sat with me watching a few minutes of Chris Matthews show tonight and hearing so much about the horse race and Bloomberg and Rudy. She asked very specific questions about who can and who can’t run. Can she ever run? Could her father? What kind of profession must you come from? Do you need a certain degree? My fourth grade students ask this question all the time: every couple weeks. And Hillary’s running means something completely different than Barack or even Libby Dole. It is possible you are too close to your work and what you know to see that, just as I am too close to my work and what I know not to see that. She and her ever-present coffee cup are real to a lot of us. I have never worked for a candidate and I don’t work for her but she is someone who makes my daughter’s horizon more real.

The reader is right. I don’t get it. But I did get Diana. Loved her. Ditto Maggie. And Golda. I think it’s partly because I would love to see a woman president that I can’t bear to think this phony could be the first one to do it.

But make sure you wait to hear all the potential side-effects.