Author: Andrew Sullivan

Just a note to say how grateful I am for the many emails in response to my post yesterday, some of which have indeed made me rethink parts of my argument. I am also grateful for Glenn's response, which you can and should read here. I'm not ducking the factual, legal, moral or political objections made by you and Glenn – I just want to mull them over, read some more, get a little rest and respond on Monday (when alas I will also be traveling), when they will have a wider audience. It says something about the blogosphere that waiting a couple of days to respond to such deep and complex waters requires an apology. But there you are. Be patient with me, please.

Again, thank you. As readers know, I respect Glenn's work deeply and regard him as a friend. With any luck this dialogue will help flesh out some of the difficult issues we have to grapple with. As always, I hope posts like his and mine and his again are the start of a conversation and debate, not an end to either. I also recommend Barry Eisler's rebuttal here; and Scott Horton's piece here.

Money quote:

I'm telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority? Yeah.

The CNN statement, as Allahpundit notes, is brutally brief. MJ Rosenberg rightly does not deny the anti-Semitism of Sanchez's rant, but rather compassionately tries to contextualize it:

I feel bad for Sanchez because his attack on Stewart and Jews was not the adult Sanchez talking but the hurt Latino immigrant child who has always felt (rightly or wrongly) that white America looked down on him. That is how it must have been for him at 6. And he still can’t get over it.

He thinks that when people like Jon Stewart see him they see a dumb Latino who should be cleaning tables. He’s wrong. They see a smart, provocative and movie-star handsome guy who has it all, and got it through hard work (and luck too, like everyone).

Cortez Island, British Columbia, 8.25 am

David Rakoff interviews himself.

Christian Jarrett summarizes a new study that explained why power increases dehumanization but why it sometimes "serves a function, allowing leaders and certain professionals, such as doctors, to cope with the decisions they have to make":

By treating other people as objects or tools, the emotional consequences of the powerful people's actions are downplayed and become irrelevant,' the researchers said. 'Although this can lead people to abuse others, it may also facilitate the powerful in making tough decisions. … Without dehumanising they would be overcome by the pain and suffering that result from their decisions.

Michael Ehrhardt interviews John Waters on gay marriage, gay wit, and the beauty of Ptown:

It’s really amazing how Provincetown somehow stays the same. … When I first arrived here, I had a girlfriend at the time. That’s how long ago it was! We shared an apartment for a couple of weeks in a building on Bradford Street in 1964, and the landlord tried to fuck us both! I loved the people here. I found an apartment and got a job at the East End Bookshop, owned by Molly Malone Cook and Mary Oliver. Then in 1967, I came back and was offered a full-time job at the Provincetown Bookshop.

I even lived in this wonderful tree fort, with a rope ladder and small apartments. Some crazy person constructed it; it had no roof, so if it rained you got soaked to the bone. It was owned by Prescott Townsend, who must have been in his late seventies and was probably from a very wealthy Boston family; he was an early gay liberationist who would ride around on a small motorcycle on the beaches and hand out gay liberation material to people. Mink Stole was going to marry him. Prescott would let you live in his tree fort if he liked you, and you got free hot dogs. Certainly there were fewer lesbians here back then. Everyone’s become compartmentalized today, and I’m against all separation. That’s the big difference now. I’m a big butch-lesbian hag. I love the ones with chips on their shoulders and heavy attitude. They’re my real favorites.

If I ever had to point to the true spirit of Ptown, I'd point – among so many rivals – to John. Watching him sail past on his bicycle means all is right in the world. But Ryan Landry (pictured above in a photo by Aaron), the grand ring-master of Showgirls and Space Pussy, is right up there. There is no social hierarchy – just a huge amount of love, far too many muscles and stacks and stacks of wigs. My favorite bar is the Vault, a totally seedy leather place where I like to smoke cigars and drink Jager shots, or the best named gay bar night in the stinking, foul basement of the Governor Bradford. It's called FagBash. I also have as a summer townie a lovely anonymity – fame of any kind is treated with the contempt it deserves.

Michael Cunningham's little book on the place, Land's End: A Walk In Provincetown, is an exquisite homage to the place and its culture. I'm back in DC now. And it still feels like a mirage, even after sixteen consecutive full summers there.

(Photo: Ryan Landry backstage at the weekly performance contest, "Showgirls", by Aaron Tone.)

Kevin Hartnett finds that politics makes fiction reading difficult:

All forms of desire have their natural enemies and I find that nothing saps my desire to read fiction like the Internet does.  This is partly physiological—too much time at the computer withers my brain—but it’s partly dispositional, too.  After the last round of primaries a couple Tuesdays ago, I spent an hour reading articles about the Tea Party. When I came up for air I was in an explicitly present-tense state of mind where anything written more than an hour ago seemed to be based on a world that had already been subsumed.  Novels, which require a willingness to attend to more enduring themes, don’t hold up very well by this perspective.

Politics as a whole has a fairly degrading effect on my fiction drive. It’s not just that it’s depressing to watch the way Congress operates—it’s that it’s depressing in such an unredeemable way.  Fiction can be depressing too, of course, but there’s something intrinsically optimistic about the process by which tragedy and frailty are turned into art.

 

David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame, shares a travelogue-cum-history of contemporary Detroit:

Part of Henry Ford’s brilliant idea with the assembly line meant that by breaking down the making of a car (a complicated piece of machinery) into miniscule jobs, he could hire unskilled (and cheap) labor to fill his factory. The original place where he first built a car was on the site of the Michigan Theater, which now houses a parking lot. There are numerous explanations for how this movie-palace-turned-parking-garage came to be.

The multiplexes in the suburbs took moviegoers away from these theaters, but this one had hit hard times before that. White folks were leaving the city center for the suburbs long before multiplexes became common. The car, and the highways the car and oil companies lobbied for, made that migration possible. Though the auto industry started here, the more successful it became, the more it destroyed the place that nurtured it. This theater, after many incarnations (one was a venue to watch live hockey games on a screen!) eventually gave up, and when the need for one more parking garage superseded any possibility of renovation there was talk of tearing it down. But it turned out it was cheaper to leave it up and simply gut it—and besides, it seemed that removing it would put the integrity of the building next door in peril—so here it remains. At least the Romans didn’t do this, though they did probably sell off all the valuable statuary that wasn’t tied down.