Category: Old Dish

Lasagna and chips; the meaning of heroism; liberal heterosexual editors; etc.

A year ago around this time, I wrote this screed against romantic love. It’s been a theme of mine – and formed part of my last book, Love Undetectable. In contrast to the breathlessness of romance, and our absurd expectations of it, I tried to argue that friendship as a form of relationship was actually a superior form of love. I still believe that on the whole, if you count romance as the “falling in love” part of what the Greeks called eros. But at the time, many people told me that romantic love fully understood could be a nobler thing, that it could encompass both friendship and romance, fusing both. I noted the argument, but was a skeptic. It behooves me to say that, a year later, I understand it a little better. No book taught me, of course. Thanks, bro. Miss you.

Chatting with English friends over the past few days, one theme keeps coming up. America is now, for the first time ever, a real empire. And the Brits know an empire when they see one. Yes, the U.S. has been a dominant global power before now; and, yes, it had an enormous sphere of influence in the past century. But it was always challenged by a serious rival in the past; and it was also hobbled by a profound ambivalence toward foreign entanglement. Both qualifications have now disappeared. My friend Niall Ferguson kept haranguing me for years about the disparity between American power and American responsibility in the post-Cold War world. In return I kept telling him that Americans simply didn’t want to be the heirs of the British Empire of the nineteenth century. It wasn’t in their DNA.

But hasn’t September 11 changed that somewhat? What that event did was end isolationism. What it proved is that a reluctance to get involved in the world wasn’t merely a moral or strategic choice of whether to intervene in other countries – i.e. Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda. It was a matter of necessity to prevent an attack on America itself. What Osama bin Laden did was what neoconservatives never fully persuaded Americans of – that America’s destiny is necessarily an imperial one. This doesn’t mean occupying everywhere – or anywhere for that matter. Technology has made warfare and empire something that can be done at a great distance and with few casualties. Moreover, the sheer gulf between the level of American power in almost every field and the rest of the world is not shrinking. It’s growing. At the end of the Cold War, America’s share of the world economic pie was around 22 percent. With the collapse of Russia and Japan and the sclerosis affecting continental Europe, the U.S. share is now 30 percent. American productivity growth since the mid-1990s has merely exacerbated this differential. Here’s Paul Kennedy, former theorist of American decline, changing his mind in the Financial Times:

In 1985, the Pentagon’s budget equalled 6.5 per cent of gross domestic product and was seen by many as a cause of US budgetary and economic-growth problems. By 1998, defence spending’s share of GDP was down to 3.2 per cent, and today it is not much greater. Being Number One at great cost is one thing; being the world’s single superpower on the cheap is astonishing… [Today], a full 45 per cent of all internet traffic takes place in this one country. About 75 per cent of the Nobel laureates in the sciences, economics and medicine in recent decades do their research and reside in America. A group of 12 to 15 US research universities have, through vast financing, moved into a new superleague of world universities that is leaving everyone else – the Sorbonne, Toyko, Munich, Oxford, Cambridge – in the dust, especially in the experimental sciences. The top places among the rankings of the world’s biggest banks and largest companies are now back, to a large degree, in US hands. And if one could reliably create indicators of cultural power – the English language, films and television, advertisements, youth culture, international student flows – the same lopsided picture would emerge.

When you add to this the current projections for future Pentagon defense spending, the empire so feared by people like Gore Vidal is no longer a theory. It is a reality. This preponderance of real global power is literally unique in the history of the world. And the one thing holding it back – America’s ambivalence and isolationism – is lying in the rubble of the World Trade Center. The further you get from America, the clearer this is. And we have only begun to think through the full consequences.

Here’s an excellent and revealing debate at the Council on Foreign Relations between Richard Perle, roving Bushie, and Leon Fuerth, foreign policy adviser to Al Gore. It proves to me at least that Fuerth is an expert at finding reasons not to do anything – a continuation of the policies of the Clinton-Gore administration that helped make us vulnerable last September 11. But check out the debate for yourself. Here’s a critical Perle outburst:

Leon would have you believe that Iran is at least a great a threat as Iraq, but I didn’t hear him recommending that we take action against Iran. Indeed, I don’t think he’s prepared to take action against any state, which is why he’s put the emphasis on the non-state network. Let me suggest to you that the non-state network he’s talking about had its roots in Afghanistan where thousands of people were trained, where the most proficient and effective prospects were identified and selected. It is no accident that the people who carried out those acts passed through those training camps in Afghanistan.
If we are going to win the war against terror, which Leon’s suggest[s should be] the emphasis of American policy, we must take that war to the states that harbor and support terrorists. If terrorists are fugitives, if they have to sleep in a different location every night, if they are hunted wherever they attempt to put down roots, we will have a decent chance of defeating terrorism. But if we shy away from taking on the states that support them, states like Iraq, they will continue to enjoy the benefits of sanctuary and the problem for an open society will be unmanageable.

That’s the rub. I’m just glad we don’t have to deal with this threat with president Al “It’s-All-So-Complicated” Gore.

GREEN BUSH: Well, he promised us something. The greenhouse gas proposal, as outlined in today’s papers, strikes me as a perfectly defensible compromise in the debate over global warming. Its most important theoretical contribution is to ally environmental progress with economic growth, and to rely on voluntary and market-driven incentives to restrain the production of allegedly harmful greenhouse gases. It’s a more full-throttled embrace of market-environmentalism than some statists would like, but, given the fact that growth and environmental health have been shown to be complementary in the past, and given that the drastic Kyoto alternative would have all but destroyed the U.S. economy (and thereby the global economy), this strikes me, at first blush, as a sound proposal. There’s a sensible use of the “right to pollute” provisions which allow dirty companies to buy polluting credits from cleaner ones, while they try to clean up their act:

Under the “cap and trade” approach, the government would set mandatory limits on emissions of those three pollutants while establishing a new market in which major polluters can purchase “credits” from non-polluting companies toward meeting their pollution targets.

All in all, a decent first stab at arguing that conservatism and environmentalism are not in any way contradictory, and in many ways, natural allies. After all, the essence of conservatism is a desire to conserve – and that means conserving our society and economy and our natural world. Bush has begun to figure out a way to do all three. The “green” left still hasn’t.

MORE CHURCHILL: After Schama, enjoy Himmelfarb.

THE ANTI-WAR LEFT RALLIES: It has started in earnest in Britain, but it will surely gain traction in parts of the United States. The argument now is that the war against terror is over; that there is no serious continuing threat, and that increases in defense spending is just a ruse for Bush to maintain political dominance at home and spread the imperium abroad. Here’s Seamus Milne in the Guardian today:

Those who have argued that America’s war on terror would fail to defeat terrorism have, it turns out, been barking up the wrong tree. Ever since President Bush announced his $45bn increase in military spending and gave notice to Iraq, Iran and North Korea that they had “better get their house in order” or face what he called the “justice of this nation”, it has become ever clearer that the US is not now primarily engaged in a war against terrorism at all. Instead, this is a war against regimes the US dislikes: a war for heightened US global hegemony and the “full spectrum dominance” the Pentagon has been working to entrench since the end of the cold war.

There is no account of the growing threat of weapons of mass destruction, complete amnesia of September 11, an assertion that the “axis of evil” is an “absurd” concept, and a tired reversion to the arguments of the 1960s and 1980s. They don’t seem to read newspaper reports such as the one in today’s New York Times, suggesting al Qaeda operatives are poised to strike again. In other words, they still don’t get it. In the Guardian, of course, they never did. But it’s a warning sign of what might lie ahead as some elements of the left ramp up their efforts to appease the forces of terror and destruction. Amnesia and complacency are their strongest weapons. The rest of us must do what we can not to forget.

THE IDEOLOGY OF BRITISH FOOD: A Canadian reader writes to say that Orwell’s inspiration for his defense of English cooking was the novelist George Gissing (also the source for Orwell’s own nom de plume). He also forwards this priceless piece of Brit propaganda as the basis for the quality of English cooking. It’s from “The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft” published in 1903:

The aim of English cooking is so to deal with the raw material of man’s nourishment as to bring out, for the healthy palate, all its natural juices and savours. And in this, when the cook has any measure of natural or acquired skill, we most notably succeed. Our beef is veritably beef; at its best, such beef as can be eaten in no other country under the sun; our mutton is mutton in its purest essence — think of a shoulder of Southdown at the moment when the first jet of gravy starts under the carving knife!
Each of our vegetables yields its separate and characteristic sweetness. It never occurs to us to disguise the genuine flavour of food; if such a process be necessary, then something is wrong with the food itself. Some wiseacre scoffed at us as the people with only one sauce. The fact is, we have as many sauces as we have kinds of meat; each, in the process of cookery, yields its native sap, and this is the best of all sauces conceivable. Only English folk know what is meant by gravy; consequently, the English alone are competent to speak on the question of sauce… Give your average cook a bit of cod, and tell her to dress it in her own way. The good creature will carefully boil it, and there an end of the matter; and by no exercise of art could she have so treated the fish as to make more manifest and enjoyable that special savour which heaven has bestowed upon cod.

I think the subtext here is pretty obvious. He’s saying: “Our food may be tasteless – but at least it isn’t French.”

Now there’s a headline I probably never thought I’d write. Anyway, for those of you curious as to what a spotted dick actually looks like, here’s an unhinged webpage with visuals of various puddings depicted in Patrick O’Brian’s novels. The “spotted dog” is a dead-ringer for the spotted dick. Slightly more alarming is a picture of a pudding called a Drowned Baby. I’m not sure I want to ask what’s in it.

In defense of mushy peas, a Southern Democrat’s lament, the barbarism of Supermax jails, etc.

No, he’s not in an Enron fix. But it’s interesting to see former labor secretary Robert Reich report over $750,000 in corporate speaking fees last year. “I do the speeches because it’s very, very easy money,” he told the Boston Herald. “I am utterly amazed the businesses are willing to pay so much for my economic expertise . . . but, if they want to pay that much, it’s a free market, I’m delighted.” Among the companies that have given him money – at $32,000 for a sixty minute speech – are Ford Motors, Panasonic, Merrill Lynch, Aetna Financial Services, Standard & Poors, Deloitte & Touche, Forbes Management Conference Group and Behrman Capital. Now, he’s running for governor of Massachusetts, and pandering to the left in the primaries. There’s nothing wrong with what he has done; and he has disclosed it all. But he’s also a journalist and founding editor of the American Prospect – a magazine often railing against corporate excess. It’s useful to know – however belatedly – just how much Reich has benefited from corporate speeches recently, while writing columns that often deal with economic issues that affect such corporations. I guess, like Paul Krugman, he is in the circle of Those Who Get Money Calls. Fair enough. But I hope he doesn’t push his new-found populism a little too far in the campaign. It would sound just a little bit phony, don’t you think? He even backed out of an early candidates’ debate in order to cash in on a $40,000 IBM gig. Those are his priorities. Or maybe they’re just a Third Way. Take it away, Mickey Kaus!

… in the lobby of the St Martin’s Lane hotel? I could have been hallucinating, but I swear it was Tina Brown. Coward that I am, I fled. Wouldn’t you?

FRIEDMAN’S SMARTS: “There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right.” Couldn’t put it better myself than in Friedman’s column today (although the turkey story veers dangerously toward self-parody). Tom Friedman is now clearly the most significant liberal voice in favor of this war. Check out the rest here.

SCHAMA ON CHURCHILL: If you’re a Winnie fanatic (as I am), then don’t miss this wonderfully fresh and perceptive piece by Simon Schama in the New York Review.

As usual, a sharp insight into Iran’s internal politics from Michael Ledeen.

SPOTTED DICK ONLINE: No, it’s not another sex-site. If you’re curious about what spotted dick actually tastes like, a reader sends word of this site as a source of gastronomic heaven/hell. Click on puddings. You can even get it in a tin can. But that’s for hard-core types only.