Category: Old Dish

An emailer from an unlikely place comments on my essay (which is free for as.com readers after a quick registration process):

Thanks for your thoughtful essay. I’m a straight, 39 year-old guy who learned a lot from it. An interesting parallel struck me: I’m a Russian-speaker and studied at a Soviet literary institute in 1986, before Gorbachev’s reforms had taken hold, and was exposed through friends to the vibrant samizdat culture of the time. Marvelous works that could never have passed the official sensors for publication, such as Venedikt Yerofeyev’s Moskva-Petushki, passed from hand to hand and were copied in pen or typed. An elderly lady I met held informal art showings in her apartment, including modernist religious paintings. Young people would head with a few hours’ notice to the woods outside the outer ring of Moscow to hear impromptu acoustic concerts by underground bands. There was a stratum of Soviet bohemenians who were far more cultured and literate than their counterparts in the West, who survived through menial day jobs in archives or museums, and lived semi-secret lives of creativity and expression. In the late 1980s, this subculture very temporarily exploded into the mainstream, as glasnost allowed publication of long-banned works and everyone on the subway would be simultaneously reading the most recently released, previously unavailable work of Bulgakov or Solzhenitsyn.

In the (relative) freedom of the Yeltsin and Putin era, that subculture died, and indeed Russian culture seems to have temporarily gone sterile (with a few bright exceptions, such as the novelist Viktor Pelevin). No sane person would want a return of the Soviets, but there is no denying that something moving and beautiful has been lost. I even wonder if a certain kind of creativity flowers best in captivity, like a plant that can only grow in a confined space. And here’s a question for you: As gay people suffer less from isolation and oppression, will they lead less often in creative expression?

I don’t know the anwer to that. What we will find out soon is which aspects of gay culture were entirely a response to oppression and which were genuine and free expressions of a complicated identity. I’m a firm believer that we are about to see a flourishing of gay cultures, plural. Many of them will interact with straight cultures. Our best days, in other words, are yet to come. Even the theocons will be unable to stop that. Freedom is a mighty thing. You can read my essay – and previous ones over the years – here.

Well, it’s a website. Just up. Not exactly a sign of his being about to pack up and go home.

WaPo’s primer on the key players in Plamegate. With the underbrush getting thicker, it’s helpful to have a chart.

Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, has now weighed in on the Bush policy of allowing abuse and mistreatment of military detainees:

The president and Congress have done little to date to clarify the situation, she said.
However, she cited fundamental national values that the rules should reflect, citing “belief in protecting the basic humanity of all people, including our adversaries. We will not stoop to the atrocities of some of our adversaries.”

Pass the McCain Amendment.

WHAT’S RIGHT WITH KANSAS: A huge victory for sanity and equality in Kansas. We are slowly seeing the impact of Lawrence vs Texas, i.e. that gay people are citizens, not deviants, worthy of equal protection under the law. The ruling can be found here.

I have to say that the conflation of the “civil rights” movement with laws making it harder to sue gun manufacturers seems a little, er, excitable to me.

A telling nugget from a National Journal story:

New York Times reporter Judith Miller told the federal grand jury in the CIA leak case that she might have met with I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby on June 23, 2003 only after prosecutors showed her Secret Service logs that indicated she and Libby had indeed met that day in the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, according to attorneys familiar with her testimony.

Well, we already know her memory is dodgy. But I can’t imagine this other amnesiac episode sat well with the Jury.

How does he look so good? He’s had work done, according to Jake Tapper. More here.

The Republicans prepare. I’d say they should be more urgently worried about life after Cheney.

Here’s our old friend, John Derbyshire, even crankier than usual:

All the windsocks are now pointing in the direction of more socialism. As the population ages, Americans will want more leisure, drugs, health care, nursing homes, security. As the Jihadist threat continues to metastasize (from the MidEast to Indonesia, Thailand, Africa, the Caucasus, Europe), we shall want the state to have more police powers, more scrutiny of us and our lives. The trend of the last 40 years away from the old Anglo-Saxon rights and liberties — private property rights (google “tobacco settlement,” “Kelo,” etc.), freedom of speech, contract and assembly (“speech codes,” anti-discrimination laws, etc.), limited government (is Washington DC shrinking? looking poorer and shabbier? not that I’ve noticed) — will accelerate. And everybody will be fine with all this, because that’s what everybody wants, except for a few freakish intellectuals like ourselves.

I can certainly see his point. But when Americans and Brits are actually presented with genuine conservatism – the kind exemplified by Reagan and Thatcher or Gingrich in 1994 – they respond. Explain to people that freedom matters, and why, and they will back it. The culprit here is George W. Bush. What he has done is provide a form of Christianist socialism, and glibly presented it as the continuation of the conservative tradition. He has thereby in one stroke delegitimized conservatism itself by falsely claiming its mantle, and also done the damage that socialists normally do to a society’s self-respect, governmental functioning, public finances and individual liberty. It will take a generation to recover. Jonah Goldberg, in a moment of candor last year, predicted that Bush’s re-election would be terrible for the conservative movement. He was right. But he voted for the guy. And that was part of conservatism’s suicide as well. They finally told the truth about Bush – but only after it could make a difference.

We now have some tentative data on Sunni Arab participation in the referendum on Iraq’s constitution. It looks like good news to me:

Turnout among registered voters reached 88 percent in Salahuddin Province, the birthplace of the deposed Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, and 58 percent in Nineveh, a Sunni-majority province that has been torn by violence, according to statistics released by the Independent Election Commission of Iraq. Turnout in the January elections was about 29 and 17 percent in Salahuddin and Nineveh, respectively.

The turnout in Salahuddin Province for the constitutional referendum was the second-highest in the country, trailing only Kurdish-dominated Erbil.

In Anbar Province, the other big Sunni region, the turnout for the referendum reached 30 percent on Saturday, according to Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a spokesman for the American military here. If that estimate proves to be true, it would represent a 15-fold increase over the January parliamentary elections, when only about 2 percent of registered voters cast ballots.

These numbers may be adjusted, so some caution is merited. And they can be interpreted in several ways. The most pessimistic is that Sunni Arabs have tried democracy and been so rebuffed they will become more embittered, and so keep providing cover for the insurgency. The most optimistic is that they have decisively realized they need to stay in the political process to make gains. I’d say the optimism is the better analysis. We will continue to have violence. What matters is that the violence does not derail the political process and does not deeply damage the economic infrastructure. What the Sunni Arab vote represents is the decision of many Sunnis to join the political process. That’s a big gain. If the political haggling continues and Sunnis gain some concessions in the coming weeks and months, we could have a small, gradual breakthrough. That’s the hope. It looks increasingly like a reality.