Category: Old Dish

“Andrew, several of my friends are long-time Sullivanites (me, too!), and all of us are blown away by your statement that you “still” do not drive. We cannot recall a previous statement from you on the issue. Now, people should be free to call themselves “American” even though they support terrorism, speech codes and the metric system, but under no circumstances can such an appellation apply to someone who eschews the car culture. I’ve just endured multiple rounds of emails from friends speculating as to the reason for your state of relative immobility. Our proffered explanations and retorts include:

(1) Andrew couldn’t hande the transition to the “wrong” side of the road. Answer: No, that’s not it–Andrew is a tough-minded dude who wouldn’t let a change like that deprive him of the independence afforded by having a car.

(2) He’s an anti-modernist who never learned how to drive. Answer: Gimme a break–does a guy who pioneered the political blog strike you as a Luddite?

(3) His health prevents him from driving. Answer: What the hell does having AIDS have to do with being able to drive? Besides, I saw him in a debate with Richard Goldstein last year, and he’s a strapping buck, so I think he can handle a steering wheel and pedals.

(4) He got busted for driving under the influence or some other infraction that involves forfeiture of his license. Answer: I think we would’ve heard about that at least once from the throng of bungholes in the blogoshere who thirst for his blood.

(5) He doesn’t need a car, because all his work is done over the internet and he never has to leave the house. Answer: What about groceries, movies, or going out to dinner?

Andrew, please, you owe your readers some sort of explanation!!”

I readily concede that not being able to drive a car might, in some people’s eyes, be a deportable offense. So why do I persist? I ride my mountain-bike everywhere I need to go in DC or Provincetown, which keeps me fit. I take trains and planes if I need to go far. I have some kind of block when it comes to getting behind a steering wheel. Every boyfriend I’ve had has offered to teach me (no stick-driving jokes please). But I never seem to get around to it; and my life as currently set up doesn’t create a felt need. Biking everywhere saves money; it saves a huge amount of time looking for parking; it keeps me fit; it helps the environment; cabs exist for a reason; cars bore me; and I have enough friends to help me out in a pinch. That’s my excuse. The real reason is that I don’t know.

Read this story and get a little worried. The British authorities deserve huge levels of praise for foiling this plot. But here’s the worrying and significant part:

Those arrested were all born and brought up in Britain. Security sources played down suggestions of any direct link between the arrested men and al-Qaida. Sources referred to groups of young radicalised Muslims who were “difficult to label” but viciously anti-western. Security sources suggested that the motive of the alleged planned attacks was anti-western but not dictated by anyone in the al-Qaida hierarchy.

The small towns they lived in in southern, suburban and rural England are exactly where I grew up, which sends a shudder down my spine. Evil has come to the Shire! What this amounts to, I think, is theological, ideological terrorism that requires no state sponsor as such and no actual network like al Qaeda. And this is surely the trend. It certainly looks as if Madrid was a similarly loosely-connected operation. I’m not saying it means we should ignore state sponsors, like Iran. Au contraire. But I am saying that a policy that focuses entirely on state sponsors is going to miss an important part of the problem.

CONCEDING A POINT: Here’s where some war critics surely have a point. Fighting back aggressively can and will increase the numbers of alienated young men across the globe eager to kill in the name of anti-Western Islamism. The answer, of course, is not to give in or appease. (There were plenty of such alienated men around to do serious damage before we responded adequately.) But it is to fight back boldly with the military, create a democratic space in the Muslim Midle East, and work to foil terror quietly, subtly and powerfully behind the scenes. It’s war, democratization and law enforcement. And Joe Nye is right (stopped clocks sometimes are). Soft power and hard power need not be self-canceling. They can aid each other. The strongest argument for Kerry is that we have already gained as much as we can for the time being with hard power and war; he won’t pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he won’t be able to duck a serious response to another terror attack; but he might help ease some of the hatred of the United States that this president has – undeservedly, in my view, but still undeniably – ratcheted to unseen levels. The strongest argument against him is that he will not take the war seriously enough to allow law enforcement to play its vital but complementary part, and would prematurely pull out of Iraq. I’m waiting to hear more from him and his advisers. Yeah: don’t rush me. It’s March. Is this a rationalization for considering Kerry? Or a reason? I blog. You decide.

I found this obituary of Alistair Cooke to be the best in the British press today. Maybe it’s hard to convey to Americans just how important Cooke was to Britons who needed or wanted to understand this vast and powerful place. But it’s also worth noting that Cooke was a brave exception to the BBC rule during the war to liberate Iraq. He understood what America experienced on 9/11 and he never descended into the mire of knee-jerk anti-Americanism that consumed the BBC in the last few years. He did this as an old-fashioned FDR-style liberal. Beneath his urbanity, you see, there was steel. He was a real idol to me in many ways. He came to America, as I did, on a Commonwealth Fund fellowship, was absorbed by the theater, as I was, and fell in love with America, as I did, while traveling across the entire country a year later. Since I still cannot drive a car, I got a friend to drive me. My friend had been a chorister at Magdalen and a tour-guide at Oxford. He was a charmer, and after many tours, American tourists would give him their card and tell him to look them up if he were ever in Tulsa, or wherever. I don’t think they ever really expected him to take them up on the offer. But we did. We rented a car, and called people from pay-phones outside various cities and sometimes stayed the night. My friend would often literally sing for his supper, slipping into a little Byrd after dinner, while I sheepishly offered a few jokes. By this method – and various Motel Sixes – we drove from Miami to Los Angeles, and from there to Seattle and back through the heartland to Boston. What a way to learn about a country! It ensured, in part, that it was the people of America I fell in love with, not just the breathtaking beauty of the place. But I digress. Cooke was a master of his form; and his extraordinary consistency and reliability was a model for would-be foreign correspondents everywhere. Except he wasn’t finally a foreign correspondent. On the fifteenth floor in New York City, with a changed name and a new accent, he was finally home. I know how he felt.

AD-BLOGGING: Why not produce and send out political ads via the Internet? Or will the campaign finance gurus soon try and make that illegal soon as well? This one is full of dumb statistical inferences, crude comparisons, soft-lens uplift. But how does that make it any worse than most paid-for ads? And you don’t have to worry that some K-Street hustler is making money off it. (Hat tip: Glenn.)

Mickey basks in well-deserved reflected glory. I think of welfare reform and gay marriage as very similar ideas: reversing some of the leftism of the past, encouraging family and responsibility, unifying rather than balkanizing society.

Kerry’s weaknesses as a candidate are exposed by the Bush machine in swing states.

I have to laugh when a few readers tell me that I have gone “left.” It is as depressing a comment as it is idiotic. For me, the left was never an option – maybe you had to grow up in Britain in the 1970s with your eyes open to see that. I raised myself on Hayek and Orwell and Havel. In college, I greeted the arrival of American missiles in Britain with a bottle of champagne. And anyone who has read this blog knows how horrified I was by part of the left’s response to 9/11. But I’m reminded of it today by this wonderful polemic by Ron Rosenbaum in the New York Observer, forwarded to me by a reader. Yes, it’s old, but it reads as fresh today as ever. Rosenbaum makes me feel less lonely, which is why perhaps this piece gladdened me so. But I implore you to read it. The money quote:

Here’s the analogy: Heidegger’s peculiar neutrality-slash-denial about Nazism and the Holocaust after the facts had come out, and the contemporary Left’s curious neutrality-slash-denial after the facts had come out about Marxist genocides – in Russia, in China, in Cambodia, after 20 million, 50 million, who knows how many millions had been slaughtered. Not all of the Left; many were honorable opponents. But for many others, it just hasn’t registered, it just hasn’t been incorporated into their “analysis” of history and human nature; it just hasn’t been factored in. America is still the one and only evil empire. The silence of the Left, or the exclusive focus of the Left, on America’s alleged crimes over the past half-century, the disdainful sneering at America’s deplorable “Cold War mentality”-none of this has to be reassessed in light of the evidence of genocides that surpassed Hitler’s, all in the name of a Marxist ideology. An ideology that doesn’t need to be reassessed. As if it was maybe just an accident that Marxist-Leninist regimes turned totalitarian and genocidal. No connection there. The judgment that McCarthyism was the chief crime of the Cold War era doesn’t need a bit of a rethink, even when put up against the mass murder of dissidents by Marxist states.

Yes, it is possible to be dismayed, betrayed and depressed by this administration’s political catering to bigotry. But it is just as possible to be grateful that it had the balls to liberate two countries from unspeakable horror and to have had the clarity to name the real evil in our day for what it is. And to fight it.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I had to laugh at the Haiku:

Left the door open
for the Prophet Elijah.
Now our cat is gone.

In 1990, when I was 14, my family left the door open for Elijah and a stray cat my mother had been feeding, but never letting in the house, rushed in. From that day forth, he became our house cat, and we gave him the only name we could – Elijah.”

As our democracy debates – as it should – responsibility for homeland security and the war against terror before and after 9/11, it’s worth remembering one important thing. Whatever you believed about the justice of the war against Saddam, Iraq is now an immeasurably freer place than it was under the hideous tyranny of Saddam Hussein. We who have never experienced such horror can easily forget the overwhelming moral case for intervention. Ann Clwyd, mercifully, hasn’t.

MASSACHUSETTS MOVES ON: The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has now set in motion a process whereby its own constitution can be amended on the matter of civil marriage for homosexuals. The amendment would bar gays from equal treatment in marriage but, at the same time, would mandate “civil unions” that are, in so far as the state has the ability to confer rights and responsibilities, exactly the same as civil marriage rights. It’s an amendment to ensure both substantive equality and semantic stigma. No one can know whether it will succeed. Social conservatives may not vote for it because it grants civil unions to a group they regard as anathema; social liberals may not vote for it because it sustains discrimination against gay couples. I’m against civil unions because I think they will be extended to straight couples and so undermine marriage as an institution. I’m not the only one. But that’s now for the people off Massachusetts and their representatives to figure out. The amendment will have to go through several more steps before it gets placed in the state constitution, if it ever does. So we’ll see. But I’m glad the debate took place; and I’m eager for a further debate about whether gay couples deserve real equality or a separate-but-equal status. What no one can deny is that this process is a serious one; that it has involved all the branches of government; that the debate has been as substantive as it has been impassioned. That’s how it should be; and Massachusetts should be allowed to figure its own way through the thicket of debate that still lies ahead. Conservatives who believe that states should have the right to decide for themselves what marriage is and whom it should include should let this process go forward unimpeded by an unnecessary and unprecedented federal intrusion. And the governor of the state should not try to interfere with the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling mandating equal marriage rights May 17. Each branch of government should play its part: it’s the genius of the American system. Let gay civil marriages exist for a while, as the court has mandated; see if the sky falls; then move deliberately forward. If the brief experiment is a disaster, it can always be repealed in 2006. If it’s a success, it can be upheld and become a model for other states to follow or recognize. That’s called federalism. Now we’ll see who really believes in it, won’t we?

POSEUR ALERT: “That lapidary aperçu is perhaps the most valuable lesson buried inside this biography of the young middle-class woman who became famous as the Hollywood Madam after her 1993 arrest.
Jamie-Lynn DiScala (Meadow on “The Sopranos”) interprets the role of the 27-year-old brothel owner with coy vacancy, and her flat affect seems part of a broader postmodern approach to the material. “Call Me” is less a made-for-television movie than an extension of the 50’s French nouveau roman; Fleiss’s immorality tale is told without almost any conventional elements like dramatic plotting, moral precepts or psychological insight. And like the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movie is more interesting in theory than in practice.” – Alessandra Stanley, in the New York Times.

“I never lost sight of the meaning that I have, or would have. And that’s why ultimately we have to treat good publicity and bad publicity as being exactly the same. You can’t let the good go to your head, because therefore you must – if you are being true to yourself – you must believe the bad. So consequently I don’t believe anything. Which is very confusing on Thursday nights.” – Morrissey, in the latest GQ.

HAIKUS FOR JEWS: If you’re Jewish and haven’t had a laugh lately, I highly recommend this little book. I think I got most of the in-jokes, but then I worked at The New Republic for quite a while. (When Leon Wieseltier was once asked to describe TNR, he famously replied, “It’s kind of a Jewish Commentary.”) Anyway, here are two of my favorites, because it’s, er, Tuesday:

Left the door open
tfor the Prophet Elijah.
Now our cat is gone.

And this little gem:

The sparkling blue sea
beckons me to wait one hour
tafter my sandwich

It’s the way you tell ’em, I guess.

SHELBY STEELE, SEPARATIST: I’ve long admired the writer and thinker, Shelby Steele, for his refusal to allow race to become a way to separate Americans into different camps, to be treated in different institutions, or to be governed by different public standards. So why is a man dedicated to the fight against separatism in favor of it when it comes to gays? Why is someone who is an old-fashioned liberal on the matter of race, such a leftist on the issue of homosexuality? I try and figure it out here.

I wrote my weekly Sunday Times column on the Richard Clarke matter last week, because my editors wanted it and because it was the only big story in Washington. And it will obviously continue. But I’m a little mystified by the furore. I never believed that either the Clinton or the pre-9/11 Bush administration took al Qaeda seriously enough; the attempts by both administrations to exonerate themselves strike me as strained. The Clinton administration deserves more scrutiny because it was in control for eight years, rather than eight months, but no one can claim with a straight face that the Bushies saw what was coming; or did enough to stop it. All that should be exposed as thoroughly as possible. But what matters now in a political year is how the Bushies responded afterwards; and, to my mind, they did about as good a job as possible. The way some people are now talking, you’d think the White House hadn’t targeted Afghanistan and al Qaeda before Saddam. But they went to al Qaeda’s base first, taking the war to the enemy patiently and determinedly – with enormous success first against the Taliban and then against Saddam. Millions are now liberated from unspeakable tyranny; reform is afoot in the Middle East; al Qaeda has been seriously wounded. Not a bad start. But I agree with the Washington Post yesterday that the more worrying sign is the way the White House has responded. They have been close to hysterical, defensive to an absurd degree and therefore unpersuasive. Their response to Clarke evokes far more doubts about their pre-9/11 conduct than anything Clarke could have mustered by himself. More evidence that they’re losing it. I think they realize they’re in trouble and don’t know quite how to right themselves. Hence the policy lurches – from Mars to marriage to steroids. The only inference I can draw is that their internal polling data is even more worrisome than the external stuff.

MARRIAGE BIGOTRY: No, I’m not referring to same-sex marriage, but to the inter-racial kind. It still evokes all sorts of prejudice and stereotypes, and if you don’t believe me, read what Boston Herald columnist, Mike Barnicle, just said about the marriage between former Defense secretary Bill Cohen and African-American Janet Langhart. It’s 2004 and we’re still obsessed with “Mandingo”? The deeper point is that inter-racial marriages are often sexualized to a degree others are not. All the complexities, banalities, duties and responsibilities that marriage entails are reduced to a sex fantasy between a black woman and a white man (and often even more so when it’s a black man and a white woman). Reducing people’s relationships to mere sex is a subtle way of dehumanizing them. And that’s one analogy between the deep animus toward inter-racial love and that toward same-sex love that rings as true today as ever.

It always amazes me how journalists respond when they are the object of inquiry, exposure and questioning. They demand these things of public figures every day – but God forbid the process should be a two-way street. Of course, the BBC is among the worst offenders. Read this story and try and stop laughing.

THE NYT GROWS UP: A good column from Dan Okrent taking the NYT’s op-ed pooh-bahs down a peg or two. And a gentle swipe at the Times’ extremely silly attempt to shut down a parody of its previously non-existent corrections page. Now, of course, the real test. Who on earth are they going to pay to “fact-check” MoDo? I fear it’s impossible. Oh, and one more thing. Why doesn’t the NYT provide actual links in its online text to sites such as the National Debate? The blogosphere drives a huge amount of traffic to the Times. Is it too much to ask for the courtesy to be returned?

MARRIAGE RIGHTS IN BRITAIN: Full marriage rights will soon be extended to gay couples in Britain, with the “m-word” being shunted gently to one side. That’s not news. What is news is the Conservative response:

“It may well be that we turn out to be ahead of the Government here,” said Alan Duncan, shadow constitutional affairs Minister and the only openly gay Tory MP. “We are watching very closely to see if the inheritance tax provisions are fair and match those of a married couple.”

The Tories are holding a conference today on gay issues in order to appeal to the gay vote. What a stark contrast with the now explicitly anti-gay Republicans.