Category: Old Dish

Went to see the premiere of the new Anne Frank mini-series at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. How do you admit you got bored by a story so morally significant? The film lasted three and a half hours, which was about two longer than I could really deal with. It wasn’t bad as such. With actors like Ben Kingsley and Brenda Blethyn doing their best to breathe life into two-dimensional roles, it had its diversions. But the rest of the time it was like a cross between Billy Elliott and Schindler’s List. It was too cutesy to be moving; and too serious to be entertaining. I’m beginning to come around to the idea that the Holocaust is probably unrepresentable. The reason Anne Frank’s diary is so unforgettable is that it isn’t a representation – it’s real. Perhaps we need popular renditions of the Holocaust to keep it alive in the minds of more people than can visit a Holocaust Museum. At the same time, I can’t help feeling that some of this pop-production cannot help but diminish the ineffable evil of the Final Solution. Even with this subject, less is sometimes more.

SCHOOL CHOICE II: Some readers have reminded me that public high schools are obliged to give equal access to different groups, and that denial of any one group’s request to use school property or funds is a punishment for that group’s First Amendment rights to self-expression. Hmmm. Is it really true that a school board could have no discretion in allowing many groups but saying no to, say, a youth chapter of the Ku Klux Klan? No, I’m not saying the Scouts are the equivalent of the Klan, but the Scouts do sadly practice discrimination against some members for simply being honest about their sexual orientation. And lets not get into the Scout-master issue here. What about the Scouts themselves? Would a group that banned black kids from being in their organization have a right to equal access to school property? I doubt it. Sorry, guys, but this is the fall-out of a perfectly Constitutional decision by the Scouts to impose discrimination on kids. It’s a crying shame, but when all is said and done, they asked for it.

“Stop nodding your fat head – sit down and shut up!” These were Christopher Hitchens’ words to Philip Nobile, a lefty journalist who hijacked Hitch’s Barnes and Noble book-reading for a rant about Vanity Fair’s lack of affirmative action. You gotta love Hitch. He smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and is one of the last remnants of a culture that knows how to fight back against cant. Now that John Prescott has decked a protestor and Hitch has called one a fat-ass, is the tide turning against loopy protesters?

NOW THEY TELL US: The South Africa health minister announced this week that her government has no intention whatsoever of buying any anti-retroviral drugs for use against HIV. Didn’t notice the story? It was barely reported. The South African government wants to spend money on health infrastructure first. Okay, so where are the howls of complaint from Tina Rosenberg, John Le Carre, Anthony Lewis, and on and on? Are they only protesting against capitalism or are they serious about their campaign against AIDS? Their silence is eloquent.

My nomination for this is the repulsive English historian David Irving, the Holocaust “minimizer” and loony rightist, who, like Vidal, is a brilliant man whose mind has warped into bile. Like Vidal’s hatred for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Irving’s loathing for Winston Churchill is simply perverse. Irving has just produced the epic second volume of his biography of Churchill, a book he claims to have spent 27 years researching. According to this early review, the book is a mish-mash of tired old myths and sinister paranoia. Irving at one point says that Churchill “invariably put the interests of the United States above those of his own country and its empire,” as if, in the battle against Hitler, such conflicts were anything but distant irrelevances. He thinks it pertinent to write that Churchill was of “partly Jewish blood, although safely diluted.” He also asserts that Churchill “was ambivalent about why he was really fighting this ruinous war.” As Andrew Roberts puts it, in this ludicrous statement, Irving “is deliberately ignoring the evidence of dozens of the finest speeches ever delivered in the English tongue, which explained to Britain and the world between 1939 and 1945 in utterly uncompromising language precisely why Nazism had to be extirpated for human civilization to survive and prosper.” Amen.

THIS JUST IN: “PROPOSAL IS LATEST U.S. REACTION TO CONCERNS THAT WAX AND WANE.” – The New York Times, today.

OLD LABOUR STRIKES BACK: Here’s something even Tony Blair can’t spin. His deputy prime minister, John Prescott, punched a protestor on the face yesterday, attacking him for throwing an egg. Or did he? Most pictures of the punch show a clear swipe by the old working class lefty turned modern centrist. But the government-run BBC, which is dubbed by some in London the Blair Broadcasting Company, quickly substituted a photo in its online edition that made Prescott look the victim. Bystanders insist Prescott threw the first punch. Who you going to believe? Tony Blair’s pet media organ or your own lying eyes?

Just for the record, the history of the Nazis’ sustained and unprecedented war on tobacco is recounted in “The Nazi War on Cancer” by Robert Proctor. Check it out. I found it riveting and chillingly familiar.

Jesse Helms, whom the Wall Street Journal laughably calls the ‘conscience of the Senate,’ is trying to pass an amendment that would withhold federal funds from schools which bar the Boy Scouts because of their discrimination against honest gay scouts and scout-masters. Now, let’s get a few things straight here, so to speak. Helms claims that the schools are violating the Scouts’ First Amendment rights. Huh? The Scouts’ First Amendment rights were upheld by the Supreme Court as they should have been. But that doesn’t mean that publicly-funded high-schools are required to give this discriminatory organization any funds or favors. On the contrary, the point of the First Amendment is that it protects the speech of private associations. It does not mandate that the public fund them. I would think this is a pretty basic distinction that conservatives of all people should grasp. Is Jesse Helms now agreeing, for example, that defunding lurid NEA-sponsored public art is a violation of the First Amendment? Secondly: aren’t conservatives supposed to support school independence, choice and autonomy? What on earth is the federal government doing intervening in the decisions of high schools, using money to dictate school policy and practice in a disputed area? Helms is explicit about this: according to Fox News, the point of the amendment is “to force [schools] to change their policy of undercutting the high court’s decision.” I have to say that this legislative initiative is a classic case of what’s wrong with some conservatives today. They are in favor of the First Amendment when the p.c. police are on the march. But they are against the First Amendment when it comes to flag burning or public schools freely deciding not to tolerate discrimination. They are in favor of school independence and choice, and local control of the curricula. But they are against it when they don’t like the results of such autonomy. This is what happens when prejudice clouds the mind. It also poisons the deepest principles of what real conservatism should be about.

The most effective poster of the current British election campaign is a Tory one about Tony Blair. It shows a hugely pregnant Blair (you can do anything with computers and photographs these days) above the slogan, “Four years of Labour and he still hasn’t delivered.” The voters seem happy to give Blair another chance but his abject failure to do anything to improve the dismal public services in Britain is a sign of something. Simply put, shoveling money into failed government bureaucracies solves nothing and wastes a lot of resources. New Labour, like the New Democrats, were supposed to forge a Third Way in which they believed in government but were somehow able to reinvent it along more effective lines. They couldn’t. So now, according to the liberal Guardian, a secret report from Tony Blair’s private think-tank is proposing radical privatization of many parts of public services, including hospitals, schools, and local government. Four years of the Third Way and Blair is resorting to Thatcherism to get any kind of results. He’ll probably win anyway – but he knows deep down that he has failed. The Third Way was a public relations campaign to persuade the middle classes to vote for the left again. It lasted eight years in America – buried by Gore’s populist campaign. I give it eight years in Britain – max.

SHE’S BACK!: Awesome Dowd column on Hillary today. How can Senator Clinton profess shock at how the F.B.I. “mislaid” important documents on the McVeigh case, when she narrowly escaped prosecution because she “mislaid” so many of her own? Ahem. Almost makes me want to have the Clintons back so I can enjoy Maureen more. W seems to have eluded her grasp so far. But maybe we just need to give her time to get her better barbs back.

EUROPE THE PURITAN: The health Nazis have crossed the Atlantic. Hold on to your Gauloises as the EU cracks down on smoking. And I mean Nazis literally. Hitler was the first author of an anti-smoking public health campaign. You’d think that might give us pause.

ALL RIGHT ALREADY: Yes, I know the Mormon church no longer supports polygamy. I also know they no longer ban African-Americans from being priests of the Church – but they very recently did – until the late 1970s, after almost every other social institution had long since opened its doors to black Americans. I also know that no-one is proposing to make polygamy legal, as they are same-sex marriage. I just think that a Church that was once founded on a principle different from traditional marriage and one that was racist to its core until very recently might be a little leery of weighing in on civil rights matters in the public square, using tax-exempt dollars to swamp media markets in Alaska and Hawaii to protest gay civil rights. Clear now?

Fascinating piece in the New York Times today about polygamy in Utah. For the first time in eons, there’s an actual attempt to prosecute it. But more fascinating to me is the following nugget: “Despite the strictures against it, polygamy continues to thrive in Utah, where state officials estimate as many as 50,000 people are part of families with more than one wife. In keeping with their desires to live on the fringe of mainstream society, most of the families reside in small, isolated towns like Partoun, but they are not unknown in larger places. A Salt Lake City prosecutor said she knew of one man in the city who the authorities believe has fathered 200 children by an assortment of women.” I point this out simply because it’s amazing to me that more on the Christian right aren’t in an uproar over this. Vast resources are devoted to stigmatizing and preventing same-sex marriage, but not a peep about the alternative lifestyle of over 50,000 Americans who are clearly exercising a choice in a way no homosexual truly does. It’s also worth pointing out that by far the biggest financial backer for campaigns against same-sex marriage rights in California, Hawaii, Alaska and Vermont is … the Mormon church. A pot and kettle moment if ever there was one.

Fascinating and highly timely story in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times about research into the medical properties of marijuana. It turns out that your basic pot may give you an all over high, but if you analyze it more closely, it’s actually affecting several discrete points in the brain and body. In fact, the brain has several “cannabinoid receptors” affecting all sorts of human functions, including higher thinking and perception, learning and memory, body movement coordination, nausea and vomiting, and appetite. Scientists in Israel, after studying the effect of marijuana (sorry: volunteers no longer needed, folks), found a particular natural chemical in the brain which latches onto the same cannabinoid receptor as pot. They called it “anandamide,” from the Sanskrit word for “bliss.” The point, and I do have one, is that illegal drugs aren’t inherently illegal. They’re just drugs. Like any compound, they can do good and harm, depending on dosage and application. But they can also be very helpful in combating disease and understanding the human brain and body. Like new research into Parkinson’s, which was sparked by observing a Parkinson’s patient on Ecstasy, research into cannabinoid receptors would not have been possible without observing the effects of pot. Other drugs that stimulate appetite, reduce obesity, calm anxiety, and so on, will now perhaps be possible, thanks to the weed. One day, I think we will look back and be completely embarrassed that we made this essentially benign and curative plant an object of prohibition.

TASTELESS HEADLINE AWARDS: Two close competitors today out there. Slate’s “CARTOON INDEX: Timothy McVeigh execution cartoons, and more.” And Jonah Goldberg’s piece on the latest McVeigh news and commentary: “Just Kill Him.”

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “Unfortunately, there’s no media frenzy to cover what happens when the state, in effect, routinely kills many Americans simply by inaction — not enforcing workplace-safety rules, or not reducing air pollution that menaces people chronically short of breath, or not providing health care for the uninsured. With the corporate-dominated state functioning as a serial killer every day, news outlets should shine a bright light on its innocent victims.” – Norman Solomon, from FAIR.

“As a cancer survivor, I am particularly susceptible to the wonderful ad in which a woman recovering from breast cancer tries to express her gratitude to the drug companies that saved her life. I know she feels the same gratitude to the doctors, the nurses, the orderlies, the health-insurance company, her best friend, her mother-in-law and many more. I know the gratitude caused by surviving cancer. I just didn’t expect to see it exploited by Big Pharmas to counter all the rotten publicity they’ve been getting for their greedy, blood-sucking, murderous behavior all over the globe.” – Yes, it’s Molly Ivins!

AMERICA THE PURITAN: The Supreme Court’s ruling against medical marijuana was no surprise, and it shouldn’t be held against the Court. The ruling clearly defers to a Congressional statute, which clearly outlaws medical use of marijuana. The problem is with the Congress and the White House who seem determined to deny sick people a genuinely helpful treatment as part of their foolish crusade against even soft drugs like pot. (For a terrific mini-essay on the injustice of this, check out Richard Brookhiser’s piece in National Review Online.) It also seems to me to be a pretty obvious case of conservative hypocrisy on states’ rights. If states like Hawaii or California want to make medical marijuana legal, why should the feds get in the way? D.C. voted for it as well – and we weren’t even allowed to see the results because Bob Barr thought it would be bad for us. This action seems to me to sum up a lot of what’s wrong with contemporary conservatism: it’s hypocritical on federalism when it doesn’t like what states do (remember the Defense of Marriage Act?); it can appear to be callous with respect to some people’s real and genuine needs; it’s illiberal when it denies individual adults freedom of choice in their personal lives. For more on this, and the left’s puritanism as well, check out my piece just posted opposite.

THANKS: For the more than 400 emails in response to my Stanford talk on C-SPAN. I’ll try and respond eventually but cut me some slack, will ya? Also sorry again for the server problem this weekend. We rely on Blogger, and they were AWOL (and still are) from Friday on. These postings are done manually by folks at Fantascope. I hope I’ll be able to post myself soon.

NOT SO SMILEY: Tavis Smiley, the avuncular host of Black Entertainment Television fame had a book-signing in D.C. last week. He’s always come across to me as a fair and balanced commentator, so it was shocking to hear what he had to say. According to the Washington Times, Smiley was a grim-faced version of Al Sharpton. On crime, Smiley observed, “Black man kills a white man, he gets executed, especially in Texas. White man kills a black man, we have riots, like in Cincinnati.” On politics, Smiley opined that Republicans are “determined at all costs to turn back the clock on the progress we’ve made.” He later described black conservatives as “self-hating” and “disturbed.” His broader message for the African-American community? “Every black person should think black first all the time.” Thus the color-blind vision of Dr King is utterly reversed. I thought identity politics couldn’t get more depressing. It just did.

I’ve criticized him before but Frank Rich’s column today is a home run. It truly is a good cultural sign that Mel Brooks and Tony Soprano are taking the bland entertainment industry to the cleaners. I think it’s more anti-p.c. backlash. Yayy!

OUR NEIGHBOR TO THE NORTH: Canada’s National Post finds that 55 percent of Canadians now support equal marriage rights for gays and straights. More significant, a whopping 73 percent of the 18 – 29 year old age bracket supports them. All in all, some 44 percent approve of homosexuality up from 22 percent just five years ago. Straw in the wind?

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “After eight years of the extremist, anti-people, anti-access policies of the Clinton administration and its overzealous application of the Endangered Species Act and the shutdown of recreational access to public lands as well as the commercial access, we’re now going to have more of a balance,” – Mike Hardiman, legislative director of the American Conservative Union. Anti-people? If only Clinton had stuck to hugging trees.