Category: Old Dish

Greg Djerejian, as so often, is on the case. Actually examining reality in Iraq, rather than massaging government p.r. is beyond some conservatives, alas. Not Greg. And not Kissinger. Djerejian is particularly withering about the delusional pro-Bush hacks at the Belmont Club.

A soldier encourages us to avoid depression about the painfully slow progress in Iraq. He’s right. Here’s some rank speculation. If the president understands that his ultimate legacy will indeed be Iraq, and that history will judge him primarily on that matter, then he needs a successor. This process will take real time and relentlessness. Who better than McCain? He can recast conservatism away from its intolerant, sectarian trend and back to the center. And he can bring to the war ferocity and humanity and trust. A McCain succession would not only be good for the country but for Bush as well. Especially if he anoints McCain himself.

I met Gene McCarthy a few times. He and TNR’s editor-in-chief, Marty Peretz, went back a very long way, and McCarthy would occasionally drop by the office and read a poem or two and ask gingerly if we’d publish them. Every now and again, we would. Others can better testify to his historic importance, but what was clearly admirable about him was his utter integrity to himself. And not an idealized version of himself: the flawed man, alone, in front of his God, doing what he believed was the right thing, even if it led nowhere, even if it was quixotic, even when he doubted it himself. That freedom of action is what will be recalled about him, and it was a freedom that almost by itself changed the fate of the Vietnam War, and of American history. McCarthy had the audacity to articulate in public his inside voice; and it pierced through the cacophony. The same, of course, can be said in a way of Richard Pryor. His own reinvention as a comic – the moment he withdrew and re-emerged as a radically new and hilarious voice – was a turning point in American popular culture. It was a watershed in how we think of race. It was a moment when a deeper truth emerged through a new comedy. Again: all that he needed was the courage to testify to his own life, and the voices he had heard around him, and to gamble everything on it. Every time you laugh at the early Eddie Murphy or Dave Chappelle, you are laughing somewhere at Richard Pryor. Both McCarthy and Pryor, of course, look a little tragic as well. Pryor’s life was a human car-wreck, with the last few years in slow motion. McCarthy separated from his wife and died in a nursing home, beloved more as an eccentric than as the bravest man in a dark hour. For me, they both represent America at its best: true to themselves, dedicated to freedom of expression, unapologetic about their uniqueness, often indifferent to what society thought of them. The great and too-often missed achievement of Western freedom is the way in which it allows true, eccentric, inspired individuals to rise. Pryor and McCarthy were giants in this, the most under-rated project of our way of life.

Are some coming around? They may have no choice. But the religious right and pro-torture hardliners will balk. For me, McCain was my candidate in 2000, and remains easily the best of the Republican field. People also forget how conservative he actually is: on spending, on winning the war, on abortion. I know it’s now conservative heresy to believe in balancing budgets, humane, competent warfare, and civil rights, but, hey, heretics sometimes turn out to be the real guardians of a lost tradition. But here’s what McCain really does. He brings back honor to the White House and trust to government. Some things can be priced. Others cannot.

A first-hand account of Provincetown’s recent history from a reader:

As one who has actively been part of the Provincetown gay scene over the past 50 years, I do not find the Banner 1950 news archive about “The Boys” summer influx at all unusual. Implicit, and at times aggressive, homophobia was part of the culture – in the Police Department, at Town Hall, and in the other institutions, church and school. Stilted rhetoric, such as, “climax of abnormality” describing aberrant behavior can be found in the Provincetown Advocate and in the Town Reports.
Right after World War II, the artistic-literary world flooded and shocked and staid Provincetown. An example is the famous Forum 49 conference held in Provincetown that featured speakers and exhibits by the prominent, new avant-garde in the artistic, literary and journalistic world. Provincetown natives were conflicted–how to encourage tourism and at the same time keep the status-quo.
Homophobia was part of a widespread sexual bigotry: cohabiting heterosexuals couples who were not married to one another were arrested, sometimes in the middle of the night, whether they were in bed with one another or not. And then there is the 1960’s Beatnik era, when police barricades were set up at the entrance to Town, and suspected Beatniks were prohibited entry. Provincetown has historically been a mixture of sophisticated and small-town mores, sometimes peacefully mixing, other times not. …the more it changes, the more it stays the same.

Another emailer comments:

Regarding your link to the Provincetown Banner, and your comments about it, I have to ask, with all due respect – are you crazy? Do you think that gay people were really welcome anywhere in this country 50 years ago? I’m in my 40s, but I live in New York and have several gay friends who are now in their 70s. Their recollections of life in the 1950s are filled with horrible accounts of police entrapment. Thanks to the draconian laws of the time, if you met someone in a bar and asked him back to your apartment, you were risking arrest. In the 60s, John Lindsay, the liberal mayor of New York instituted a crackdown on gay bars that caused further misery. All this took place in one of the most sophisticated cities in the world. Do you really think that the citizens of a rural beach community like Provincetown, whatever its history as a haven for artists and non-conformists, were happy about a large influx of gay summer people during this same period of time?
It is true that gay people have made tremendous achievements over the last several decades – being 48, I feel like I have seen several lifetimes of social change since I came out in 1979. But when you announce the end of gay culture, it really makes me want to burp. You may be right in the long run, but these kind of grand pronouncements ignore the very real details of what so many young gay people are still undergoing today.

As any reader of the essay will see, I specifically made the latter point myself. The gradual emergence of the truth about human lives, and our political and social response to it, will always be uneven, and sometimes contradictory. But that doesn’t mean that the truth, once it has emerged, is easily forgotten. Or that it doesn’t change lives.

According to Time. But the Onion has the real scoop.

Beliefnet is having a reader-voting contest to pick the most inspiring person of 2005. Captain Ian Fishback, who risked his career to expose and correct widespread abuse of detainees in Iraq, is in the final round of voting. Put him over the edge. Vote here.

If you’re looking for my response to Charles Krauthammer on his proposal to legalize torture, here it is.

It’s a must-read on literary depictions of that lowest of occupations, the journalist. Hitch cannot avoid some nostalgia for the old days:

Yes, the suicidal imbibing in the King and Keys, or the Punch, or El Vino. Yes, the demented whims of the latest proprietor. Yes, the overflowing ashtrays and the pounding of ancient upright typewriters. Yes, the callousness and gallows humour. (“Shumble, Whelper and Pigge knew Corker,” as Waugh describes a hacks’ reunion in Scoop. “They had loitered of old on many a doorstep and forced an entry into many a stricken home.”) And yes, it’s true that the most celebrated opening line of any Fleet Street war correspondent was that of the hack in the Congo who yelled: “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”

How Hitch turns stuff out of this quality and quantity is a mystery to me. It must be alcohol and nicotine and raw, insane talent, I guess.

“Politics turns into virtue what religions often see as a vice – the fact that we do not all think alike, that we have conflicting interests, that we see the world through different eyes. Politics knows what religion sometimes forgets, that the imposition of truth by force and the suppression of dissent by power is the end of freedom and a denial of human dignity. When religion enters the political arena, we should repeat daily Bunyan’s famous words: ‘Then I saw that there was a way to Hell, even from the gates of Heaven.'” – Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, reminding us of something vital that today’s Republican leadership has forgotten.