Category: Old Dish

“My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility. In vicious attacks like the one on Spitzer, gay activists, with all their good intentions, are aligning themselves with the forces of ignorance and repression. Too little reliable work is currently being done in homosexuality because free inquiry cannot be conducted in a politicized atmosphere of harassment and intimidation.”- who else but La Paglia, in Salon.

AND I THOUGHT JONAH GOLDBERG WAS RISQUE: Check out the Onion’s take on what Beijing is doing to impress the International Olympics Committee.

Where else but in Plymouth, Margaret Thatcher finally weighed in enthusiastically behind William Hague’s uphill battle to win the British election. Plymouth, as she put it in her inimitable style, “England’s historic opening to the world. [Where else but] Plymouth – from where Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, and Captain Cook set out to take the ways of these islands to the uttermost bounds of the earth? Plymouth – from where the Pilgrim Fathers left in that cockle-shell vessel on a voyage which would create the most powerful force for freedom that the world has known?” This is a classic speech, a reminder of what leadership is, a reminder of what conviction is. My favorite passage is her assessment of New Labour: “New Labour’s main appeal, when you get down to it, is quite simply that it’s not old Labour. And that’s true as far as it goes. I had some respect for the old Labour Party, which stood for certain principles – wrong as they were. But today’s Labour Party has no discernible principles at all. It is rootless, empty and artificial. And when anything real or human surfaces despite the spin – it’s the bitter, brawling, bully that we hoped we’d seen the last of twenty years ago.” Can’t she just come back and run for office?

Smart little piece by Vaughn Ververs, editor of the Hotline, Washington’s favorite addiction. He points out that John McCain’s interview in Rolling Stone, where McCain said he’d have accepted the vice-presidential nod if Bush had asked him, got barely any media buzz. (Ververs’ mention was the first I’d heard of it.) Not surprising, I’d say. With campaign finance reform apparently inevitable and the tax cut imminent, the Bush-McCain rivalry stories have little wind behind them. Then there’s the Republican maverick niche, which has now been adopted by the craggy Luftmensch Jeffords. For my part, I always felt that McCain was a party man, and not prone to Jeffords-like shenanigans. Look how he played along after he lost the nomination to Bush. And look how he hasn’t had a cow over the tax cut. (McCain likes tax-cuts. He’s a Republican.) There’s still the hideously named Patients’ Bill of Rights, which McCain could exploit. But my best bet is that McCain is biding his time for a while. Which to my mind is the smartest thing for him to do.

HAZE IN WASHINGTON: Bummer of a day. Woke up with a fever and a voice that sounded like a cross between Bob Dole and Diane Rehm. Turns out I have bronchitis. What to do but slump with the beagle and try and read the latest Philip Roth. I don’t know of any writer who does as well with sex. Somehow he manages to make it faintly unsavory and yet ennobling. It’s also so refreshing to read a man who writes so easily about his sexual attraction for women, especially young women, without any of the usual p.c. cant. Good practice for my interview with Penthouse tomorrow. (It’s on politics, mercifully.) The only problem is that if you’re actually sick, reading is hard. I knew I was desperate when I found myself watching the evening news for the first time in months. What dreck. The actual information you get from Rather-Jennings-Brokaw is somewhat less than a couple of pages of cliché-ridden type, filled with stock video images. What’s the point? Jennings was reduced to announcing that tomorrow they’ll have a special feature on gadgets for retirees. It’ll make a nice interlude between the ads for incontinence pads and Maalox. And they take themselves soooo seriously.

HOME NEWS: You may have noticed the link to C-SPAN’s RealPlayer video of my Stanford speech. So many of you asked for it that we just put it up. Good luck with the download. Sorry, there’s no transcript. I make it up as I go along. But most of the ideas are developed at length in Virtually Normal.

Finally forced by my inability to find any book I actually want, I tried to bring order to my bookshelves tonight. I’ve tried this from time to time – with always the same effect. I get asthma from all the dust and within about half an hour, I find an old book I’d forgotten I owned and start reading. This time, it was a collection of the poet Philip Larkin’s prose. I’ve always been a lover of Larkin’s painful, subtle and often hilarious poetry – but he’s also a brilliant raconteur and curmudgeon, much of which, it turns out, was for show. Anyway, I thought you’d all get a kick out of this interchange from the Paris Review. Larkin was famous for giving interviews to pretentious literary types and spending most of the time quietly making fun of them. Here’s a classic:

“You haven’t been to America, have you?
Oh, no, I’ve never been to America, nor to anywhere else for that matter… I suppose everyone has his own dream of America. A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: the rest is a desert full of bigots. That’s what I think I’d like: where if you help a girl trim a Christmas tree you’re regarded as engaged, and her brothers start oiling their shotguns if you don’t call on the minister. A version of pastoral.”

So in the great red-zone vs. blue-zone debate, I think we know where Larkin would stand. Now, back to the bookshelves – oh, never mind.

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE WATCH: Browsing through the Washington Times over my Number 3 Supersized tonight, I came across a Bill O’Reilly column arguing that the pedophile group NAMBLA should be made illegal even for disseminating its views that under-age boys are old enough to have consensual sex. The First Amendment be damned – these people are evil! On the next page, I read that Alabama’s attempt to reform its marriage laws so that fourteen-year-olds can no longer legally marry has failed because of a filibuster. Fourteen? So let’s get this straight. In some states, what Mary Eberstadt would call a frightening new tolerance of pedophilia has been around and fully legal for more than a century. And Eberstadt didn’t even mention it in her recent Weekly Standard article on “pedophilia chic”? And O’Reilly is apparently unaware of it as well. One wonders why the religious right isn’t campaigning against a law which essentially condones child-abuse. And then one realizes that when pedophilia is heterosexual and in Alabama, some on the religious right couldn’t give a damn.

BUTCH ENOUGH: So-so piece in the L.A. Times on new research into the origins of homosexuality. But one nugget interested me: according to some researchers, gay men might be gay because they were exposed to higher than normal levels of testosterone in the womb. By analyzing how men and women hear differently, researchers expected to find gay men somewhere in between female and male hearing patterns. What they found is that gay men have hyper-masculinized hearing patterns – more attuned to “male” sounds than most straight men. Similarly, according to another researcher, the wonderfully named Marc Breedlove, the length of most gay men’s fingers suggests that they were exposed to greater-than-normal levels of male hormones prenatally. Breedlove also cites less reliable studies that show that gay men may have slightly higher levels of testosterone than straights and bigger genitalia. Hmmmm. We’re at such an early stage of understanding these things scientifically that I’m leery of making a call here. But my own experience would lead me to think that what might be at fault here is the single notion of homosexuality. Maybe there are homosexualities. Maybe some are more effeminate than usual; maybe some are more masculine. Hence drag queens and leather bars, flaming nellies and masculine bodybuilders. The fact that one can be attracted to members of the same gender doesn’t mean you have to be feminine; it might even mean you’re more masculine. How else do you explain the Marines?

Caught your attention? Two new pieces posted today. One is a profile of William Hague, old friend and apparently doomed Tory leader; the other is about the trend toward “soft” stories in news magazines. I’m for both.

Terrific cartoon from Tom Tomorrow shows alarming evidence that some on the left are intelligent and even … funny. It’s about arsenic, and captures the idiocy of the Democrats’ p.r. war on the issue in the first hundred days. Check it out.

THE LEFT AND AIDS: More signs of intelligent life – this time from Anthony Lewis, the columnist who only recently blamed most of the AIDS crisis on greedy multinational pharmaceutical companies. It seems like he’s been doing some reading, lately. How else to explain the following sentence: “Giving up a legal battle in South Africa, the major international drug companies have agreed to make drugs available at very low prices. But there are still daunting obstacles to the use of those drugs on the scale needed, including the lack of adequate health infrastructures to administer complex dosages.” Thanks, Tony, for a belated recognition of reality. Now get to work pointing out how the South African government is still offically skeptical of the HIV and AIDS connection, and has no intention of distributing anti-HIV drugs of any kind. Is that Merck’s fault as well?

Gray Davis has finally found an answer to his own state’s energy crunch: hire some Clinton-Gore attack-dogs. Noticed how he’s been ratcheting up the rhetoric to divert blame from his own disastrous energy policies? John Fund explains how it’s only going to get worse now that Davis has hired Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani, Clinton-Gore hatchetmen. And we thought the tone was changing …

There has been a sharp decline in cases of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain – none reported lately – but the morally horrifying slaughter continues. At the peak of the epidemic, around 33,000 animals were being slaughtered daily. That figure has now increased to a daily kill-rate of 79,000. Slaughter on this scale has meant the predictable cruelties. Among the allegations of inhumanity, according to the Sunday Times, are: “Animals being buried alive after suffering hours of pain from bolts fired into their skulls. The slaughter of piglets and kids with soft-nosed dumdum bullets that explode on impact, shattering bone and shredding flesh. New-born piglets and calves being beaten to death with spades and iron staves.” Cheaper than vaccination apparently.

FIRST ARIANNA, NOW KRISTOL?: Frank Foer has a typically stimulating essay in the new New Republic. He limns Bill Kristol’s slide away from conservative orthodoxy toward what Kristol calls “national greatness conservatism.” Foer argues that Kristol’s flirtation with John McCain’s primary candidacy was not just another piece of political opportunism (remember Kristol’s momentary crush on Colin Powell?) but a recasting of the conservative movement. How would it be recast? Kristol’s conservatism would have fewer reservations about a sizable welfare state; it would run foreign policy on moral interventionist lines, rather than rely on classical conservative realism; it would increase its skepticism of corporate America; it would fill the empty public square of liberalism with a sinewy patriotism. Call it New Republic Republicanism. The money-quote of the piece is this from Kristol, whining about his somewhat cramped social life under the Bushies: “Why are conservatives so upset? It isn’t that we supported McCain; it’s that we haven’t apologized for supporting him. There’s something sick about a movement like that.” I’m not convinced that Frank is entirely right. Although Kristol’s urban neocon roots make for an uneasy alliance with the Bush-Cheney axis, there’s plenty of time for Kristol to tack rightward again if the opportunity arises. He’s no Arianna. In fact, I’d put his chances of ending up an Independent or a Democrat as the same as John McCain’s, i.e. close to zero. It would be far more interesting if either broke ranks for good, but both must remember Pat Buchanan. Or the Republican aftermath of Teddy Roosevelt for that matter.

TESTOSTERONE STRIKES AGAIN: You know the pomo left line that there are no real psychological or biological differences between men and women? Since I got mauled by the usual suspects when I posited the bleeding obvious about testosterone in the New York Times Magazine last year, I’ve kept my eyes peeled on the subject. Interesting new study along these lines on pilot error from Johns Hopkins University. Comparing plane crashes between 1983 and 1997 in the U.S., and analyzing the types of error responsible, researchers found that men are more likely to screw up “because they run out of fuel, take risks with the weather and faulty aircraft, or forget to lower their landing gear. Women on the other hand are more likely to mishandle the controls or stall during take-off or landing.” According to the Daily Telegraph, male mistakes were far more likely to be related to risk-taking, flying planes with known problems, or misjudging the weather. Women were more cautious. The study included 144 women pilots and 287 men. Like most of these studies on nature-nurture, this one doesn’t prove anything. But like so many other studies on these lines, it’s mighty suggestive.

ANOTHER LEFTY DROPS THE “BUSH-IS-DUMB” LINE: “The left got rolled for years by Ronald Reagan’s dumb act, and I fear “W” is no dummy either – appearances, quite obviously, to the contrary.” – Eric Alterman, The Nation. Who says they never learn?

GAYS FOR BUSH’S TAX CUTS: Interesting data from Frank Luntz in a poll for the Center for the Study of Taxation. 82 percent of gay voters want to see the estate tax repealed; 72 percent called it discriminatory. That follows up on a Gill Foundation study that found earlier this year that gays and lesbians put taxes on the same level as same-sex unions as their highest priority issue – higher than the “civil rights” agenda favored by many gay rights organizations. Memo to Rove: if you blow this opportunity to make an historic bridge to gays and lesbians, you’ve only got yourself to blame. (Of course, it also means that once again, I’m out of step with my fellow homos. Sorry, guys.)

Why do the Feds ban marijuana but keep its active ingredient, THC, legal in pill form? Because they want to ban enjoyment, that’s why. Check out TRB opposite.

HOME NEWS: We should have a RealVideo tape of my Stanford speech posted today. It’ll be a link to the C-SPAN site, posted underneath the articles on the right. To all of you who asked where they could find a copy or download one, this is one option. Thanks too for Tipping Jar contributions. We just went past 500 individual contributions – over $12,000. You’ll see the results soon – promise. Plus: another jump in traffic. We’re on course for 175,000 unique visitors this month – up from 80,000 in January. Thanks – and spread the word.