Category: Old Dish

The toilet’s fixed. Now where are my back issues of the American Prospect?

“The federal government was badly shocked after Sept. 11. The elites thought they had to get the American people focused on something else. And so we’re bombing the hell out of Afghanistan. I’m sorry to say this, but I think that’s what this whole war on terrorism is all about: It’s about maintaining urban property values. It is necessary to do whatever they can to keep people willing to pay exorbitant prices for a small apartment in Manhattan or San Francisco or Los Angeles.” – Harvard professor (who else?) John Stilgoe, San Francisco Chronicle, explaining why capturing Mullah Omar will push up property values in Marin County.

“So did we have such a good time in 1971 by seeing how wretched we were and what a failure our world was? Well, yes, I think so, and, yes, I miss the angry critical intelligence in young people – no matter that it was often too extreme in 1971. It is a marvel, now that a crisis has persuaded so many of us to think that we are at war and to give up the critical scrutiny of decisions about our freedoms and our economy that are far more damaging in the long run than the attack on the World Trade Center.” – David Thomson, New York Times.

THE GENIUS OF THE MARKETPLACE: Alan Dershowitz’s attack on the Bush vs Gore decision is now remaindered at 70 percent off. Still not worth $7.50 though.

Imagine, for a moment, that Al Gore was now president. Now stop shaking for a minute and think hard. If Gore had built a presidential ranch that was one storey high, got all its electricity from the sun, and was described by the New York Times as a “model of the yuppie modern ranch,” don’t you think it would become an emblem of his presidency? So why hasn’t it happened to Bush? Here’s the Times: “The first lady, Laura Bush, has overseen the planting of native Texas grasses. The house is environmentally correct, with a passive solar design, geothermal cooling and heating, a cistern to catch rainwater and purification tanks and filters so that water from the house can be recycled for use in irrigation.” Does Bush get any credit for this? Do his environmental critics – who have yet to find a substantive difference between Bush’s and Clinton’s environmental policies – acknowledge that Bush is an actual, living, breathing environmentalist? While Gore talked a good game, does he know anything about tending to thousands of acres of actual brush land the way W does? I point this out just to show how lazy the press is. You start with a picture of Bush as a gas-guzzling, arsenic-pushing tool of Big Oil, and you sure as heck try and avoid anything that might complicate this picture. Of course, Bush is partly to blame. Unlike most modern yuppie pols, he doesn’t see his private life as just another propaganda tool. But that doesn’t mean the press shouldn’t notice more. Memo to Rove: how about Bush inviting a couple of environmental journalists to his ranch to show off his energy conservation? How about linking it to a speech that stresses such values in order to help wean us off foreign sources of energy? There’s no need to do a Tom Friedman, but you really do need to tackle this anti-environmental smear that has so far stuck to you.

EURO-INDIFFERENCE: My take on the new currency, posted opposite.

KRISTOF CLEAR: I’ve known Nick Kristof for twenty years or so, since we were at Magdalen, Oxford, together. He’s one of the nicest, smartest guys you can find. He’s also dead wrong about the war. It’s probably good luck that he only started writing his war column for the Times in the last month, because he is one of very few Times’ columnists who weren’t publicly getting things wrong in the beginning. But he’s making up for his absence since. In his last two columns, he has urged the U.S. to let Mullah Omar go and to leave Somalia’s terrorist cells alone. He has the classic Times view that poor countries and foreign peoples need to be treated like peasants by a benevolent overlord. Poor little Omar. He’s blind, you know. He didn’t really mean to sponsor terrorism aimed at murdering thousands of innocents. Can’t we relocate him to Palm Springs? As for Somalia, what’s really needed is lots and lots of aid to help these poor people. Bombing them is only useful for leveraging the international focus into such aid. Huh? Who’s proposing a bombing raid anyway? And isn’t Somalia a prime location for Qaeda refugees? Coming up: why Osama bin Laden should be allowed to go free as long as he promises us that he won’t be naughty any more; and why Iraq just needs more American aid to get it to behave more nicely. Well, at least he isn’t Anthony Lewis. Kristof isn’t a bore as well as naxefve. He’s just naxefve.

After September 11 and the president’s speech to Congress in which he laid out a clear doctrine of zero tolerance for terrorism, it seems to me our foreign policy is clear. Both Israel and India – at either ends of the Islamic Middle East – must be unequivocally supported in their struggles against Islamo-fascism. Both are democracies; both allow freedom of religion; both have enemies who are friendly with the perpetrators of the WTC massacre. To play footsie with either country now, to do anything but provide extremely clear public support, would deeply undermine the integrity of our own struggle against this destabilizing evil. I see no evidence that the administration has done anything but back both countries – but for a while there, I had real worries that the same kind of moral equivalence that we falsely ascribe to Israel and the PLOHamasHizbollah was one we were beginning to apply to India and Pakistani-sponsored terrorist groups. I’m with India on this one, and am glad they pushed this principle to the brink of warfare to get their message across.

LETTERS: Straight readers sympathize with the double standards applied to gay lives and relationships.

FOXY LOGIC: I pretty much agree with the Wall Street Journal editorial today, giving an unneeded fillip to Bernie Goldberg expose of hyper-liberal CBS. But I do have a problem with part of it. The Journal praises Fox News as “an organization that delivers news straight, without tilting left or right.” Oh, come on. Now, Fox News does some great stuff. They’re fresher, smarter and often more balanced than the network news. But obviously, they tilt right, often helpfully so. So why give us this guff about “we report, you decide,” etc, etc. It’s great p.r., I guess, if lies are good p.r. But it’s not even vaguely true. What bugs me about CBS and ABC and NBC News is not that they are left-leaning, which is completely fair enough, but that they refuse to admit it. I don’t begrudge Peter Jennings his left-liberalism. I begrudge him his pomposity and pretense to objectivity. It seems to me that as long as Fox plays the same Jennings game, tacking right while refusing to acknowledge its own bias, it’s going to be hard for conservative cultural critics to gain much high ground in this debate.

It ended in typical fashion. I made it to the “Lord of the Rings,” only to find it was sold out. After a Mickey D’s Number 2, I rented a movie and watched it with the beagle. At approximately 10.45 pm, my toilet exploded. It had been dripping for a couple of days but this was hardly the weekend to call a plumber. I figured I would find one after New Year’s. Then as I plopped myself innocently down on the porcelain, a fizzing sound behind me became a gushing sound and water was suddenly pouring into my apartment like a geyser. I tried to turn off the valve through the torrent – but it was the valve that was broken. My wonderful neighbors, enjoying a New Year’s Eve bash next door and upstairs, took control and started bailing the water into my trash can. It was filling up every 45 seconds or so. One of them finally shoved a pen into the pipe to stop the flow. Pity it was a red ink pen. It exploded too, and my neighbors look a little pink today. We tried again with a ballpen. More success. After about half an hour of my acting like Shelley Winters in the Poseidon Adventure, I called a friend in construction and he showed up like a Guardian Angel in a few minutes and managed to locate the cold water switch in my apartment. (I know, I know. I’m clueless). Old Faithful subsided, and I gave my savior some Moet and took him out to a dance-club for the night. I got back around 6am, crashed and woke up an hour ago. I have a hangover, but still have no water and it’s New Year’s Day and even the gym is closed. I’ll use my next door neighbor’s shower. Thank God I live in a condo building. My only consolation is that this particular piece of comedy can still be psychologically attributed to 2001. May the new year get better.

Actually, ‘readers’ is a bad term. You’re correspondents, interlocutors, researchers, fact-checkers, brainiacs, mentors, friends, family, and much more. This past year has been such an adventure for me. When I started this website, I thought it would be a useful way to collect my journalism, and have an easy place for people to contact me. I didn’t realize it would soon become a two-way broadcasting channel for a whole host of ideas and arguments and facts and jokes and stories. This may be a cliché but it’s also true: you are at least 50 percent of the product. You notice so many things no single person could alone; you keep me on my toes; you cheer me up and bring me down; you make me think and rethink. You’re not afraid to tell me how it is, or where I’ve screwed up, or where I’ve got it right.

ONWARD: I guess the kind of journalism we have jointly helped pioneer is somewhere between an op-ed column and talk-radio. I’ve tried hard to keep it honest and real, to admit mistakes, to think (sometimes stupidly) aloud, to take risks, and irritate some of my professional colleagues when they deserve to be irritated. I’ve also tried to keep it human, to get away from the notion that a writer or pundit is somehow above it all, a creature of certainty, free from error or emotion. And you have responded in kind. Your emails of personal support, or kindness and stern admonition have all made my year an extraordinary one. Whether it was getting through this horrifying fall (which we did, in some sense, in real time, together) or whether it was surviving my embarrassing sexual ‘outing’ last spring, you helped me stay focused and sane. I will always be grateful for the strangers who are now my friends.

2002: For whatever reasons, the whole thing seems to have worked. In a year, the number of visits has quintupled. Only last summer, I was thrilled to have 7,000 daily visits. Now, we rarely go below 20,000 and have reached as high as 77,000. All of which is to say: a deep, heartfelt thanks to all of you. I think we’re pioneering together a new kind of opinion journalism, as well as a new relationship between writer and readers. Editors and proprietors, wonderful though they can be, are dispensable in this new cyber-age. That’s a huge shift. It’s already fomenting a whole subculture of web-logging that is changing the political and intellectual culture. And we’re only at the very beginning of the new era. In a few days, our redesign will be up. Later in January and February, new features will be added. You’ll see several corporate allies on the site, from American Express to Dell, helping to make this model financially viable. More will follow. I hope this site will be as unrecognizable at the end of 2002 as it is at the end of 2001. And the thrill is that I have no idea where we’ll end up. Anyway, stay along for the ride. Keep your donations and links and gripes coming. And have a wonderful, blessed, righteous, happy New Year.

Only a few days ago, we were told that former president Bill Clinton was launching a new spin campaign to help counter the notion that he was lax on terrorism. In today’s New York Times, hardly an anti-Clinton paper, a thorough three-part series on the Clinton terrorism legacy concluded. It was pretty damning, although it gave Clinton far more leeway than I think he deserves. And what was Clinton’s response? He refused to be interviewed. Getting other people to spin for you is ok. Actually taking personal responsibility and facing up to your mistakes is – once again – an impossibility for the ex-president.

CORRECTION: “The Green Mile” was a movie not released in 2001. It was so awful I’m still recovering.

BEGALA AWARD WINNER 2001: “Perhaps it’s eerie serendipity, perhaps it’s my paranoia, but an acid thought keeps plaguing me. Isn’t it odd that on the day – the DAY – that the Democrats launched their most blistering attack on “the absolute lunacy” of Bush’s unproven missile-defense system, which “threatens to pull the trigger on the arms race,” what Senator Biden calls today in the Guardian, his “theological” belief in “rogue nations,” that the rogue nation should become such a terrifying reality. The fact that I could even think such a thought says more to me about the bankruptcy and moral exhaustion of our leaders in the face of a disaster where any action, in the current nightmare, will seem like heroism. But I do smell destabilizing violence in the wings. In fear, the nation, to my mind, has always proved mean-spirited and violent.” – John Lahr, in Slate, speculating that president Bush might have been behind the attacks on the World Trade Center.

ANDREWSULLIVAN.COM’S PERSON OF THE YEAR: Donald Rumsfeld.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD WINNER 2001: “Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past – I’m not arguing for despotism s a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble – recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin’s penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an “enemy of the people. The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, “clan liability”. In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished “to the ninth degree”; that is, everyone in the offender’s own generation would be killed, and everyone related via four generations down, to the great-great-grandparents, would also be killed.” – John Derbyshire, in National Review Online, almost calling for the murder of Chelsea Clinton. And they fired Ann Coulter for excessive zeal?

BEST INNOVATIONS: iPods, weblogs, segways.

WORST INNOVATIONS: The anti-sleep pill, Al Gore’s beard, Amtrak’s Acela trains.

SONTAG AWARD WINNER 2001: “Then young men broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head. I couldn’t see for the blood pouring down my forehead and swamping my eyes. And even then, I understood. I couldn’t blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.” – Robert Fisk, the Independent.

BEST MOVIES: A.I., Amelie, Memento.

WORST MOVIES: American Pie 2, Harry Potter, The Green Mile.

WORST WAR COLUMNISTS: Maureen Dowd, Anthony Lewis, Madeleine Bunting, Stephanie Salter.

BEST WAR COLUMNISTS: Charles Krauthammer, Tom Friedman, Dick Morris, Victor Davis Hanson.

WORST PREDICTION OF THE YEAR: Mickey Kaus’s assertion in September that the World Trade Center massacre would be off the media radar screen by Thanksgiving.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD WINNER: “Meanwhile the popular expectation of a knockout blow against the Taliban has been cruelly disappointed. Remember the optimistic remarks a couple of weeks back about the way American bombs were eviscerating the enemy? This has given way to sombre comment about the Taliban’s dogged resistance. Evidently our leaders gambled on the supposition that the unpopularity of the regime would mean the bombing would bring about the Taliban’s rapid collapse. And they also seem to have assumed that it would not be too difficult to put together a post-Taliban government. This was a series of misjudgements. The Joint Chiefs may have been misled by the apparent success – now that Milosevic has been defeated – of the bombing campaign in Kosovo. Perhaps they should have reflected on Vietnam. We dropped more tons of explosives on that hapless country than we dropped on all fronts during the Second World War, and still we could not stop the Vietcong. Vietnam should have reminded our generals that bombing has only a limited impact on decentralised, undeveloped, rural societies.” – the always wrong Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Independent, November 2.

LOSERS OF THE YEAR: Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Gerald Levin, Bill Clinton, Susan Sontag, Jim Jeffords.

WINNERS OF THE YEAR: Tony Blair, Eminem, Aaron Brown, Condi Rice, Bernard Lewis, Marc Rich, Barry Diller.

POSEUR ALERT WINNER 2001: “But make no mistake about it: PopOdyssey is not retrogression to pre-irony pop spectacle. It is the dialectical answer to U2’s (and alternative rock’s) attack on spectacle. It is pop in defense of itself … Anyone who saw the MTV “Making of the Video” episode about ‘N Sync’s “Pop” now knows that this is definitely no clean-cut band. If anything, ‘N Sync is losing touch with its audience’s needs, and “Pop” (certainly an inferior single compared with “Bye Bye Bye”), with its lyrics of “What we’re doing is not a trend/ We got the gift of melody,” may ultimately prove to be a case of pride before the fall, of Nero choreographing a lavish, beautiful and thoroughly entertaining dance as Rome burns around him.” – Neil Strauss, New York Times, June 5.

MOST EFFECTIVE LIAR: Former Senator Bob Kerrey.

MOST INEFFECTIVE LIAR: Gary Condit.

WORST TELEVISION PERFORMANCE 2001: Connie Chung.

GAFFE OF THE YEAR: “I think that President Bush is also very committed in drug addiction.” – Colombian president Andres Pastana, April 23.

Runner-up: “I think we launder our views through out “objective critics” and certainly the press is pretty green, the press is pretty pro-environment. And I don’t think there’s any question that they, as a body, feel that Bush is wrong on the environment, with varying degrees of willingness to give him credit, and I’m excluding the conservative press, “The Weekly Standard” and so forth. But, generally, the rank and file press is pretty green and they’re going to use the Europeans to take the Bush’s to task.” – Evan Thomas, Newsweek, June 16.